Sunday 10th August Raymonoff states
'Germany will never accept Georgia into NATO after this... pretty much his game is over. '
Same day my reply
'I note your words re a genocide trial and also Germany not admitting Georgia into NATO. We will see whether you are correct. Time will prove you wrong.'
Within the last couple of hours at a joint press conference with Medvedev Merkel says Georgia WILL be joining NATO.
If I had a couple of days to do some research I guess it is possible that I could find something Raymanoff has said on this topic that is correct but it would be hard work to do so and possibly well-nigh impossible.
Repercussions of Russian / Georgian conflict
by Oracle » Fri Aug 15, 2008 3:38 pm
Congratulations to Saakashvili ..... he has played his part well for the Americans. 
After 18 months prevaricating the feint hearted Poles have been persuaded to sign up their country as part of America's insurgence into Europe.
What a shame the Poles lacked the maturity as a nation to stand up to this forceful persuasion from the US ... Poland was the first victim in WWII and I guess they want to offer themselves as targets for WWIII ....
After 18 months prevaricating the feint hearted Poles have been persuaded to sign up their country as part of America's insurgence into Europe.
What a shame the Poles lacked the maturity as a nation to stand up to this forceful persuasion from the US ... Poland was the first victim in WWII and I guess they want to offer themselves as targets for WWIII ....
Independent wrote:US and Poland sign defence dealAP
Friday, 15 August 2008
Poland and the United States struck a deal that will see a missile defence shield in the ex-communist state and deepen military ties, a plan that has infuriated Moscow and sparked fears in Europe of a new arms race.
"We have crossed the Rubicon," the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said yesterday, referring to US consent to Poland's demands after more than 18 months of often terse talks.
In an interview on news channel TVN24, Tusk said the United States had agreed to help augment Poland's defences with Patriot missiles in exchange for placing 10 missile defence interceptors in the Eastern European country.
He said the deal also includes a "mutual commitment" between the two nations to come to each other's assistance "in case of trouble."
The clause on mutual assistance appeared to be a direct and potent reference to Russia, which has threatened to aim missiles toward Poland — a former Soviet satellite — if it agreed to host the US site.
Washington says the system, which does not yet work, is needed to protect the US and Europe from possible attacks from so-called rogue states, including Iran.
However, Poland has all along been guided by fears of a newly resurgent Russia — fear that recent fighting in Georgia has only magnified.
-
Oracle - Leading Contributor
- Posts: 23507
- Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2008 11:13 am
- Location: Anywhere but...
by ARMENIAN CYPRIOT » Fri Aug 15, 2008 11:34 pm
Great article I got from antiwar.com. Enjoy
August 15, 2008
Mikheil Saakashvili:
War Criminal
A politician's hubris causes untold human suffering
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the geopolitical analyses and ideological posturing on the occasion of the Three-Day War between Russia and Georgia, we are losing sight of the very real human costs of this conflict: thousands of civilians killed and grievously wounded, a city, Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, in ruins, and the hopes and dreams of the inhabitants of this largely overlooked backwater dashed on the rocks of a politician's hubris.
That politician is Mikheil Saakashvili, the all too glib president of Georgia, whose slickness is so apparent that it seems to leave an oily residue on every word he utters. The decidedly apolitical, non-ideological Web site Reliefweb put it this way:
"The place that has suffered most is South Ossetia which is home to both ethnic Ossetians and Georgians, the latter accounting for about a third of the population. The destruction there has been appalling and it looks as though many hundreds of civilians have died, in the first place as a result of the initial Georgian assault of August 7-8. Gosha Tselekhayev, an Ossetian interpreter in Tskhinvali with whom I spoke by telephone on August 10 said, 'I am standing in the city center, but there's no city left.'
"Ossetians fleeing the conflict zone talk of Georgian atrocities and the indiscriminate killing of civilians."
They may be talking of Georgian atrocities, but we in the West have not heard them – nor will we, given the bias of our media, which is in thrall to the Georgia lobby and its U.S. government sponsors. The "mainstream" has already settled on a narrative to explain events in the Caucasus, and nothing short of a South Ossetian holocaust will wake them from their hypnotic state. The Russians, in their view, have got to be the bad guys, i.e., the aggressors. Anything that doesn't fit into that storyline is cut from the script. Yet, as Reliefweb reports:
"On August 7, after days of shooting incidents in the South Ossetian conflict zone, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili made a speech in which he said that he had given the Georgian villagers orders not to fire, that he wanted to offer South Ossetia 'unlimited autonomy' within the Georgian state, with Russia to be a guarantor of the arrangement.
"Both sides said they were discussing a meeting the next day to discuss how to defuse the clashes.
"That evening, however, Saakashvili went for the military option. The Georgian military launched a massive artillery attack on Tskhinvali, followed the next day by a ground assault involving tanks.
"This was a city with no pure military targets, full of civilians who had been given no warning and were expecting peace talks at any moment."
As if to underscore the utter indifference of Western media to the suffering of anyone politically incorrect enough to be pro-Russian, CNN broadcast footage of war-torn Tskhinvali even as its news announcer solemnly "reported" that the Russians were wreaking devastation on a city in Georgia proper, a classic case of the Orwellian media manipulation techniques that pass for journalism in the West. An unintended irony: the footage was a few feet from the spot where Russian peacekeepers had been slaughtered, the first victims of the Georgian assault. Or was it intended?
The tragicomic aspects of this media-induced cognitive dissonance came to the fore on Fox News the other day, when the announcer was interviewing a 12-year-old American girl who happened to be sitting in a café in Tskhinvali when Georgian bombs started raining down on her head. The announcer's eyebrows shot up when the girl thanked the Russian soldiers. After the girl and her aunt finished their recounting of Georgian atrocities, the announcer capped off his report by intoning: "There are gray areas in war."
The matter of attacking civilians is no doubt a moral "gray area" for the neocons at Fox, but what about the rest of the media – or is there no longer much of a difference, at least when it comes to the Russian question?
The Georgians were the aggressors here, and not only that, it was a particularly vicious sneak attack, undertaken while "peace talks" were supposedly taking place. As Reliefweb put it:
"The attack looked designed to take everybody by surprise – perhaps because much of the Russian leadership was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games. It also unilaterally destroyed the negotiating and peacekeeping arrangements, under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that have been in place for 16 years. Russian peacekeeping troops based in South Ossetia were among those killed in the Georgian assault."
The Georgian offensive provoked a massive exodus to the north. Thousands fled, and with good reason. As the Guardian reports:
"Many had traveled in their nightclothes on rocky roads through the mountains and gave bloodcurdling accounts of Georgian atrocities. 'I came in the boot of a car. Georgian snipers were firing at us from the forest. My brother stayed to fight. Our grandparents' home was reduced to rubble. We don't know where they are. Nothing is left of their village. It was totally destroyed by rockets and tank fire,' Alisa Mamiyeva, 26, a teacher in Tskhinvali, said from the safety of Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia."
The South Ossetians claim 1,400 dead, thus far, most of them victims of the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali, and Vladimir Putin went so far as to accuse the Georgians of launching a "genocide." According to the BBC, however, "Russia failed to back up its claims of Georgian atrocities." Not that the West is all that interested in airing the evidence. As Variety put it in a piece on how this war is being reported,
"Coverage in the U.S. and Europe is leaning heavily toward reports on the Georgian casualties of Russian bombing over the weekend. Few details are being given about the thousands said to have been killed when Georgia attacked Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Thursday and Friday."
The blatant media bias displayed by the "mainstream" news organizations is more than matched by the shameful cover-up of Georgian atrocities by the mainline "human rights" organizations, first and foremost Human Rights Watch. In the most brazen display of willful ignorance since Walter Duranty overlooked the Soviet gulags, HRW spokeswoman Anna Neistat told the Guardian that Ossetian claims of Georgian atrocities were "suspicious":
"The figure of 2,000 people killed is very doubtful. Our findings so far do not in any way confirm the Russian statistics. On the contrary, they suggest the numbers are exaggerated."
Neistat avers that no more than 44 were killed and around 200 were wounded in the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali. Perhaps she should talk to International Red Cross spokeswoman Anna Nelson, who reports area hospitals "overflowing" with the dead and the wounded.
The voices of the Ossetians are barely reaching the West, but when they do – as in this Australian Broadcasting Corp. news report – they underscore the sheer ugliness of HRW's appalling apologetics::
"One woman told how a family of four including two children tried to flee from a Georgian tank but it 'fired on their car and they were all burned' to death, said Angela, who like all the refugees only gave her first name. In another incident, a woman eight months pregnant and two family members fleeing from the city under attack were hit by tank fire and 'nothing remained of them,' Angela said.
"She saw the Georgian tanks roll into Tskhinvali, the soldiers shouting 'Hail Saakashvili,' who is the president of Georgia. 'They destroyed the city,' added Inna, 33, who said she could not understand how the Georgian troops 'could do that to civilians.'
"'You see your friend's home burning and there's nothing you can do. You just watch and cry, it's a genocide,' Inna said. An old woman among the refugees said all she had left was the dress she was wearing. 'My house is destroyed,' she said."
More important than the hypocrisy and ideology-induced moral myopia of the "human rights" crowd, however, is the very real human suffering that is being pointedly overlooked. These are real people being killed and rendered homeless, people who now live in terror and uncertainty while we in the West sit around discussing the geopolitical implications as if individual human beings were pieces on a chessboard.
The U.S. is now delivering "humanitarian" aid under the aegis and protection of the U.S. military, a gesture that underscores the Bizarro World absurdity of a foreign policy that has us arming the Georgians and then paying to clean up the damage done by our proxies. This is truly an odd sort of "humanitarianism," one inextricably linked to the inveterate sadism of our foreign policy.
This "humanitarian" gambit is just that: a device designed to legitimize our growing intervention in the region. While Defense Secretary Robert Gates is clearly not at all thrilled by the prospect of U.S. soldiers entering the battle zone, it seems unavoidable, at some point, since we'll be supervising "humanitarian" flights and relief efforts. (Not to mention future military joint exercises involving U.S. and Georgian forces, such as the ones that concluded shortly before the war commenced.) With Russian troops intent on staying in Ossetia, Abkhazia, and other regions such as Adjaria eager to take this opportunity to break free of the Georgian central government, the likelihood of renewed fighting is high.
To Antiwar.com's audience, and regular readers of this column, none of this – Saakashvili's folly, the Ossetian question, the volatile immediacy of the crisis – is anything new. As I wrote in November 2006:
"Russian 'peacekeepers,' OSCE 'observers,' South Ossetian troops, and the U.S.-trained-and-equipped Georgian military are facing off along ill-defined borders, with renegade 'rebel' bands supporting one side or the other running wild in the no-man's land in between. This is a recipe for disaster, and an armed confrontation is bound to occur, with the distinct possibility of escalating into all-out warfare. The Russians would soon be drawn in, and the U.S. could not escape being dragged into this particular vortex – with fateful consequences all 'round.
"I can just hear McCain barnstorming the country in '08, denouncing 'Russian imperialism' and demanding that we 'stop Putin' in the Caucasus before Russian troops cross the Bering Straits."
We at Antiwar.com have been warning of the dangers of Russophobia, which seems to have run rampant on the neoconservative right in recent days. It was always present (at least since the Kosovo war) as an animating force on the "humanitarian interventionist" left, i.e., George Soros & Co. As much as I hate to say "I told you so," in this case, it seems unavoidable, albeit not in very good taste. Yet there's no time for such niceties, these days. It is time to be blunt and get right to the point.
Antiwar.com is fighting a war on two flanks: a constant struggle against the disinformation dumped daily into the airwaves, most of it originating in the Washington offices of the War Party, and another battle on another front – a war for our very survival.
The rising costs, human as well as financial, of carrying on this campaign for truth are exacting a heavy toll. Our tiny staff is grossly overworked, we're cutting corners left and right, and we don't know where the money to make it through the next quarter is going to come from. And that's where you come in.
Look, you're being dunned daily on the main page of the site, and I don't want to hector you much more. All I can say is that Antiwar.com has earned your financial support, and then some. We've been waging a pretty effective fight against the War Party, giving them tit for tat and giving our readers a far more realistic perspective on world events than any "mainstream" outlet. Yet the War Party still poses a deadly danger, and they're always up to new tricks. More importantly, we don't have the resources they can mobilize at a moment's notice, and we don't have any hopes of doing so. But we don't need all that moolah. We just need to reach the American people with our message, and we can do that quite effectively via the Internet. They have mega-millions, but we have something they can never match: the credibility our brand name has built up over the years.
Since 1995, we've been in the front lines of the battle, breaking the real news and fact-checking government officials within an inch of their lives – and we need your help to keep going. Once again, we're swimming against the tide on this South Ossetia-Georgia story, debunking the official media narrative and bringing our readers a commodity more precious than gold: the truth.
That's why it's so important that we continue our work, but we can't do it without your support. We depend on the generosity and acute awareness of our readers, who know how important it is to win the battle for hearts and minds. We have the War Party on the run, but we need your support to keep going. Your contribution is 100% tax-deductible, and you can give online or via mail. Contribute today.
~ Justin Raimondo
Print this | Email this | Save this
comments on this article?
send them to backtalk!
[visit backtalk!]
Back to the Antiwar.com Home Page
Print this
Email this
Save this
Archives
Mikheil Saakashvili:
War Criminal
8/15/2008
'Poor Little Georgia' – Not!
8/13/2008
The Real Aggressor
8/11/2008
The Anthrax Follies and the Bizarro Effect
8/8/2008
Bruce Ivins: The Movie
8/6/2008
The Patsy
8/4/2008
Joe Klein Speaks Truth to Power
8/1/2008
Is the Surge Working?
7/30/2008
The War Party's Credo: Power Before Profits
7/28/2008
Follow That Story!
7/25/2008
Is Obama the 'Antiwar Candidate'?
7/23/2008
A Brazen Evil
7/21/2008
Coercive 'Diplomacy' – Prelude to War
7/18/2008
Amber Alert!
7/14/2008
Iran and the Photoshop Threat
7/11/2008
The Shift
7/9/2008
Fake Flip-Flop Flap
7/7/2008
Who Planned the Anthrax Attacks?
7/4/2008
Don't Wait for World War III
6/30/2008
Is War Good For the Economy?
6/25/2008
Imperial 'Justice'
6/23/2008
The Welfare-Warfare State
6/20/2008
Enough Already!
6/18/2008
You Want Change?
6/16/2008
The Revolt of the Liberated
6/13/2008
'Faster, Please!'
6/11/2008
Obama Capitulates
6/6/2008
Will Obama Stand Up to the War Party?
6/4/2008
Reclaiming the American Right
6/2/2008
Standing Up Against the War Party
5/30/2008
Into the Bosnian Quagmire, Part 3
5/28/2008
Into the Bosnian Quagmire, Part 2
5/26/2008
Into the Bosnian Quagmire
5/23/2008
No Rest for the Wicked
5/21/2008
Bush's True Calling
5/19/2008
'May You Live In Interesting Times'
5/16/2008
Obama vs. The Lobby
5/14/2008
The Prime Directive
5/12/2008
The Silenced Majority
5/9/2008
Why Isn't It the End of Hillary?
5/7/2008
Assassins of Peace
5/5/2008
Divert, Distract, and Demonize
5/2/2008
Is War With Iran Imminent?
4/28/2008
Pollard's Ghost
4/25/2008
Turning the Page on US Foreign Policy, Part 2
4/23/2008
The Middle East: Turning the Page on US Foreign Policy
4/21/2008
What We're About
4/18/2008
How the War Party Captured the Right
4/16/2008
Bob Barr: Wrong About Colombia
4/14/2008
Israel Loves Mugabe
4/11/2008
Endless Enemies
4/9/2008
The Barr Factor
4/7/2008
A Tragi-Comic Cavalcade of Chicanery
4/4/2008
NATO Marches Eastward
4/2/2008
Is Another 9/11 Inevitable?
3/31/2008
The Mystery of American Foreign Policy
3/28/2008
Why They Hate China
3/26/2008
Iraq Recession – or Iraq Depression?
3/24/2008
Iraq and the Virtue of Selfishness
3/21/2008
Iraq: Five Years After the Conquest
3/19/2008
Smearing Obama
3/17/2008
Pure Fantasy: Colombia's Laptop Revelations
3/14/2008
'Fox' Fallon Fired
3/12/2008
A Strategy for Peace – and Survival
3/10/2008
Confessions of an Obama Cultist
3/7/2008
More Archives
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Reproduction of material from any original Antiwar.com pages
without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2008 Antiwar.com
August 15, 2008
Mikheil Saakashvili:
War Criminal
A politician's hubris causes untold human suffering
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the geopolitical analyses and ideological posturing on the occasion of the Three-Day War between Russia and Georgia, we are losing sight of the very real human costs of this conflict: thousands of civilians killed and grievously wounded, a city, Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, in ruins, and the hopes and dreams of the inhabitants of this largely overlooked backwater dashed on the rocks of a politician's hubris.
That politician is Mikheil Saakashvili, the all too glib president of Georgia, whose slickness is so apparent that it seems to leave an oily residue on every word he utters. The decidedly apolitical, non-ideological Web site Reliefweb put it this way:
"The place that has suffered most is South Ossetia which is home to both ethnic Ossetians and Georgians, the latter accounting for about a third of the population. The destruction there has been appalling and it looks as though many hundreds of civilians have died, in the first place as a result of the initial Georgian assault of August 7-8. Gosha Tselekhayev, an Ossetian interpreter in Tskhinvali with whom I spoke by telephone on August 10 said, 'I am standing in the city center, but there's no city left.'
"Ossetians fleeing the conflict zone talk of Georgian atrocities and the indiscriminate killing of civilians."
They may be talking of Georgian atrocities, but we in the West have not heard them – nor will we, given the bias of our media, which is in thrall to the Georgia lobby and its U.S. government sponsors. The "mainstream" has already settled on a narrative to explain events in the Caucasus, and nothing short of a South Ossetian holocaust will wake them from their hypnotic state. The Russians, in their view, have got to be the bad guys, i.e., the aggressors. Anything that doesn't fit into that storyline is cut from the script. Yet, as Reliefweb reports:
"On August 7, after days of shooting incidents in the South Ossetian conflict zone, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili made a speech in which he said that he had given the Georgian villagers orders not to fire, that he wanted to offer South Ossetia 'unlimited autonomy' within the Georgian state, with Russia to be a guarantor of the arrangement.
"Both sides said they were discussing a meeting the next day to discuss how to defuse the clashes.
"That evening, however, Saakashvili went for the military option. The Georgian military launched a massive artillery attack on Tskhinvali, followed the next day by a ground assault involving tanks.
"This was a city with no pure military targets, full of civilians who had been given no warning and were expecting peace talks at any moment."
As if to underscore the utter indifference of Western media to the suffering of anyone politically incorrect enough to be pro-Russian, CNN broadcast footage of war-torn Tskhinvali even as its news announcer solemnly "reported" that the Russians were wreaking devastation on a city in Georgia proper, a classic case of the Orwellian media manipulation techniques that pass for journalism in the West. An unintended irony: the footage was a few feet from the spot where Russian peacekeepers had been slaughtered, the first victims of the Georgian assault. Or was it intended?
The tragicomic aspects of this media-induced cognitive dissonance came to the fore on Fox News the other day, when the announcer was interviewing a 12-year-old American girl who happened to be sitting in a café in Tskhinvali when Georgian bombs started raining down on her head. The announcer's eyebrows shot up when the girl thanked the Russian soldiers. After the girl and her aunt finished their recounting of Georgian atrocities, the announcer capped off his report by intoning: "There are gray areas in war."
The matter of attacking civilians is no doubt a moral "gray area" for the neocons at Fox, but what about the rest of the media – or is there no longer much of a difference, at least when it comes to the Russian question?
The Georgians were the aggressors here, and not only that, it was a particularly vicious sneak attack, undertaken while "peace talks" were supposedly taking place. As Reliefweb put it:
"The attack looked designed to take everybody by surprise – perhaps because much of the Russian leadership was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games. It also unilaterally destroyed the negotiating and peacekeeping arrangements, under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that have been in place for 16 years. Russian peacekeeping troops based in South Ossetia were among those killed in the Georgian assault."
The Georgian offensive provoked a massive exodus to the north. Thousands fled, and with good reason. As the Guardian reports:
"Many had traveled in their nightclothes on rocky roads through the mountains and gave bloodcurdling accounts of Georgian atrocities. 'I came in the boot of a car. Georgian snipers were firing at us from the forest. My brother stayed to fight. Our grandparents' home was reduced to rubble. We don't know where they are. Nothing is left of their village. It was totally destroyed by rockets and tank fire,' Alisa Mamiyeva, 26, a teacher in Tskhinvali, said from the safety of Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia."
The South Ossetians claim 1,400 dead, thus far, most of them victims of the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali, and Vladimir Putin went so far as to accuse the Georgians of launching a "genocide." According to the BBC, however, "Russia failed to back up its claims of Georgian atrocities." Not that the West is all that interested in airing the evidence. As Variety put it in a piece on how this war is being reported,
"Coverage in the U.S. and Europe is leaning heavily toward reports on the Georgian casualties of Russian bombing over the weekend. Few details are being given about the thousands said to have been killed when Georgia attacked Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Thursday and Friday."
The blatant media bias displayed by the "mainstream" news organizations is more than matched by the shameful cover-up of Georgian atrocities by the mainline "human rights" organizations, first and foremost Human Rights Watch. In the most brazen display of willful ignorance since Walter Duranty overlooked the Soviet gulags, HRW spokeswoman Anna Neistat told the Guardian that Ossetian claims of Georgian atrocities were "suspicious":
"The figure of 2,000 people killed is very doubtful. Our findings so far do not in any way confirm the Russian statistics. On the contrary, they suggest the numbers are exaggerated."
Neistat avers that no more than 44 were killed and around 200 were wounded in the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali. Perhaps she should talk to International Red Cross spokeswoman Anna Nelson, who reports area hospitals "overflowing" with the dead and the wounded.
The voices of the Ossetians are barely reaching the West, but when they do – as in this Australian Broadcasting Corp. news report – they underscore the sheer ugliness of HRW's appalling apologetics::
"One woman told how a family of four including two children tried to flee from a Georgian tank but it 'fired on their car and they were all burned' to death, said Angela, who like all the refugees only gave her first name. In another incident, a woman eight months pregnant and two family members fleeing from the city under attack were hit by tank fire and 'nothing remained of them,' Angela said.
"She saw the Georgian tanks roll into Tskhinvali, the soldiers shouting 'Hail Saakashvili,' who is the president of Georgia. 'They destroyed the city,' added Inna, 33, who said she could not understand how the Georgian troops 'could do that to civilians.'
"'You see your friend's home burning and there's nothing you can do. You just watch and cry, it's a genocide,' Inna said. An old woman among the refugees said all she had left was the dress she was wearing. 'My house is destroyed,' she said."
More important than the hypocrisy and ideology-induced moral myopia of the "human rights" crowd, however, is the very real human suffering that is being pointedly overlooked. These are real people being killed and rendered homeless, people who now live in terror and uncertainty while we in the West sit around discussing the geopolitical implications as if individual human beings were pieces on a chessboard.
The U.S. is now delivering "humanitarian" aid under the aegis and protection of the U.S. military, a gesture that underscores the Bizarro World absurdity of a foreign policy that has us arming the Georgians and then paying to clean up the damage done by our proxies. This is truly an odd sort of "humanitarianism," one inextricably linked to the inveterate sadism of our foreign policy.
This "humanitarian" gambit is just that: a device designed to legitimize our growing intervention in the region. While Defense Secretary Robert Gates is clearly not at all thrilled by the prospect of U.S. soldiers entering the battle zone, it seems unavoidable, at some point, since we'll be supervising "humanitarian" flights and relief efforts. (Not to mention future military joint exercises involving U.S. and Georgian forces, such as the ones that concluded shortly before the war commenced.) With Russian troops intent on staying in Ossetia, Abkhazia, and other regions such as Adjaria eager to take this opportunity to break free of the Georgian central government, the likelihood of renewed fighting is high.
To Antiwar.com's audience, and regular readers of this column, none of this – Saakashvili's folly, the Ossetian question, the volatile immediacy of the crisis – is anything new. As I wrote in November 2006:
"Russian 'peacekeepers,' OSCE 'observers,' South Ossetian troops, and the U.S.-trained-and-equipped Georgian military are facing off along ill-defined borders, with renegade 'rebel' bands supporting one side or the other running wild in the no-man's land in between. This is a recipe for disaster, and an armed confrontation is bound to occur, with the distinct possibility of escalating into all-out warfare. The Russians would soon be drawn in, and the U.S. could not escape being dragged into this particular vortex – with fateful consequences all 'round.
"I can just hear McCain barnstorming the country in '08, denouncing 'Russian imperialism' and demanding that we 'stop Putin' in the Caucasus before Russian troops cross the Bering Straits."
We at Antiwar.com have been warning of the dangers of Russophobia, which seems to have run rampant on the neoconservative right in recent days. It was always present (at least since the Kosovo war) as an animating force on the "humanitarian interventionist" left, i.e., George Soros & Co. As much as I hate to say "I told you so," in this case, it seems unavoidable, albeit not in very good taste. Yet there's no time for such niceties, these days. It is time to be blunt and get right to the point.
Antiwar.com is fighting a war on two flanks: a constant struggle against the disinformation dumped daily into the airwaves, most of it originating in the Washington offices of the War Party, and another battle on another front – a war for our very survival.
The rising costs, human as well as financial, of carrying on this campaign for truth are exacting a heavy toll. Our tiny staff is grossly overworked, we're cutting corners left and right, and we don't know where the money to make it through the next quarter is going to come from. And that's where you come in.
Look, you're being dunned daily on the main page of the site, and I don't want to hector you much more. All I can say is that Antiwar.com has earned your financial support, and then some. We've been waging a pretty effective fight against the War Party, giving them tit for tat and giving our readers a far more realistic perspective on world events than any "mainstream" outlet. Yet the War Party still poses a deadly danger, and they're always up to new tricks. More importantly, we don't have the resources they can mobilize at a moment's notice, and we don't have any hopes of doing so. But we don't need all that moolah. We just need to reach the American people with our message, and we can do that quite effectively via the Internet. They have mega-millions, but we have something they can never match: the credibility our brand name has built up over the years.
Since 1995, we've been in the front lines of the battle, breaking the real news and fact-checking government officials within an inch of their lives – and we need your help to keep going. Once again, we're swimming against the tide on this South Ossetia-Georgia story, debunking the official media narrative and bringing our readers a commodity more precious than gold: the truth.
That's why it's so important that we continue our work, but we can't do it without your support. We depend on the generosity and acute awareness of our readers, who know how important it is to win the battle for hearts and minds. We have the War Party on the run, but we need your support to keep going. Your contribution is 100% tax-deductible, and you can give online or via mail. Contribute today.
~ Justin Raimondo
Print this | Email this | Save this
comments on this article?
send them to backtalk!
[visit backtalk!]
Back to the Antiwar.com Home Page
Print this
Email this
Save this
Archives
Mikheil Saakashvili:
War Criminal
8/15/2008
'Poor Little Georgia' – Not!
8/13/2008
The Real Aggressor
8/11/2008
The Anthrax Follies and the Bizarro Effect
8/8/2008
Bruce Ivins: The Movie
8/6/2008
The Patsy
8/4/2008
Joe Klein Speaks Truth to Power
8/1/2008
Is the Surge Working?
7/30/2008
The War Party's Credo: Power Before Profits
7/28/2008
Follow That Story!
7/25/2008
Is Obama the 'Antiwar Candidate'?
7/23/2008
A Brazen Evil
7/21/2008
Coercive 'Diplomacy' – Prelude to War
7/18/2008
Amber Alert!
7/14/2008
Iran and the Photoshop Threat
7/11/2008
The Shift
7/9/2008
Fake Flip-Flop Flap
7/7/2008
Who Planned the Anthrax Attacks?
7/4/2008
Don't Wait for World War III
6/30/2008
Is War Good For the Economy?
6/25/2008
Imperial 'Justice'
6/23/2008
The Welfare-Warfare State
6/20/2008
Enough Already!
6/18/2008
You Want Change?
6/16/2008
The Revolt of the Liberated
6/13/2008
'Faster, Please!'
6/11/2008
Obama Capitulates
6/6/2008
Will Obama Stand Up to the War Party?
6/4/2008
Reclaiming the American Right
6/2/2008
Standing Up Against the War Party
5/30/2008
Into the Bosnian Quagmire, Part 3
5/28/2008
Into the Bosnian Quagmire, Part 2
5/26/2008
Into the Bosnian Quagmire
5/23/2008
No Rest for the Wicked
5/21/2008
Bush's True Calling
5/19/2008
'May You Live In Interesting Times'
5/16/2008
Obama vs. The Lobby
5/14/2008
The Prime Directive
5/12/2008
The Silenced Majority
5/9/2008
Why Isn't It the End of Hillary?
5/7/2008
Assassins of Peace
5/5/2008
Divert, Distract, and Demonize
5/2/2008
Is War With Iran Imminent?
4/28/2008
Pollard's Ghost
4/25/2008
Turning the Page on US Foreign Policy, Part 2
4/23/2008
The Middle East: Turning the Page on US Foreign Policy
4/21/2008
What We're About
4/18/2008
How the War Party Captured the Right
4/16/2008
Bob Barr: Wrong About Colombia
4/14/2008
Israel Loves Mugabe
4/11/2008
Endless Enemies
4/9/2008
The Barr Factor
4/7/2008
A Tragi-Comic Cavalcade of Chicanery
4/4/2008
NATO Marches Eastward
4/2/2008
Is Another 9/11 Inevitable?
3/31/2008
The Mystery of American Foreign Policy
3/28/2008
Why They Hate China
3/26/2008
Iraq Recession – or Iraq Depression?
3/24/2008
Iraq and the Virtue of Selfishness
3/21/2008
Iraq: Five Years After the Conquest
3/19/2008
Smearing Obama
3/17/2008
Pure Fantasy: Colombia's Laptop Revelations
3/14/2008
'Fox' Fallon Fired
3/12/2008
A Strategy for Peace – and Survival
3/10/2008
Confessions of an Obama Cultist
3/7/2008
More Archives
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Reproduction of material from any original Antiwar.com pages
without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2008 Antiwar.com
-
ARMENIAN CYPRIOT - Regular Contributor
- Posts: 1141
- Joined: Thu Sep 22, 2005 6:51 am
by Kikapu » Sat Aug 16, 2008 9:57 pm
George W. Bush has been talking about the Territorial Integrity of Georgia must be and will be protected from anyone trying to take parts of it away from her.!
Well, there goes any hope of Bush ever supporting the "trnc" ever being recognized, since the north is part of the Territorial Integrity of Cyprus, says the UN and the EU.!!
Any game playing during these settlement talks to make the talks collapse deliberately in the hopes of an instantaneous recognition of the north, is best not tried, because it "ain't" gonna happen.!!
Well, there goes any hope of Bush ever supporting the "trnc" ever being recognized, since the north is part of the Territorial Integrity of Cyprus, says the UN and the EU.!!
Any game playing during these settlement talks to make the talks collapse deliberately in the hopes of an instantaneous recognition of the north, is best not tried, because it "ain't" gonna happen.!!
-
Kikapu - Leading Contributor
- Posts: 18050
- Joined: Sun Apr 16, 2006 6:18 pm
by miltiades » Sun Aug 17, 2008 10:53 am
Russia is considering arming its Baltic fleet with nuclear warheads for the first time since the cold war, senior military sources warned last night.
The move, in response to American plans for a missile defence shield in Europe, would heighten tensions raised by the advance of Russian forces to within 20 miles of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, yesterday.
Under the Russian plans, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of the Baltic fleet based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between the European Union countries of Poland and Lithuania. A senior military source in Moscow said the fleet had suffered from underfunding since the collapse of communism. “That will change now,” said the source.
“In view of America’s determination to set up a missile defence shield in Europe, the military is reviewing all its plans to give Washington an adequate response.”
I wonder if the Russians would make a request to the RoC for her nuclear fleet to be allowed access to the Cypriot ports !!!
The move, in response to American plans for a missile defence shield in Europe, would heighten tensions raised by the advance of Russian forces to within 20 miles of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, yesterday.
Under the Russian plans, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of the Baltic fleet based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between the European Union countries of Poland and Lithuania. A senior military source in Moscow said the fleet had suffered from underfunding since the collapse of communism. “That will change now,” said the source.
“In view of America’s determination to set up a missile defence shield in Europe, the military is reviewing all its plans to give Washington an adequate response.”
I wonder if the Russians would make a request to the RoC for her nuclear fleet to be allowed access to the Cypriot ports !!!
-
miltiades - Leading Contributor
- Posts: 19837
- Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2006 10:01 pm
by Raymanoff » Sun Aug 17, 2008 11:14 am
Well, they have been provoked...dont blame them. Russians did offer a huge monitoring radar station in Caucasus where Americans could see Irans air activities. There must be a counterbalance to all this, you can't just surround Russian East with Patriot Installations pointing to IRAN... fine, install but there will be 1 SILO per Patriot Installation always ready to go... tit for tat.
-
Raymanoff - Regular Contributor
- Posts: 2119
- Joined: Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:36 pm
- Location: Vraxonisida
by Nikitas » Sun Aug 17, 2008 1:27 pm
You gotta love Condoleeza's indignation at the occupation by a foreign power of a smaller country, and her protestations re territorial integrity etc. How about some of that for Diego Garcia, where Britan KICKED OUT the WHOLE of the population to build a base? But then Diego Garcia is not ruled by a Harvard wanker and is nowhere near a pipeline, or pipe as Ray calls it.
Everything is pipes!
Everything is pipes!
- Nikitas
- Main Contributor
- Posts: 7420
- Joined: Thu Aug 09, 2007 2:49 pm
by miltiades » Sun Aug 17, 2008 2:12 pm
Nikitas wrote:You gotta love Condoleeza's indignation at the occupation by a foreign power of a smaller country, and her protestations re territorial integrity etc. How about some of that for Diego Garcia, where Britan KICKED OUT the WHOLE of the population to build a base? But then Diego Garcia is not ruled by a Harvard wanker and is nowhere near a pipeline, or pipe as Ray calls it.
Everything is pipes!
Nikitas , this is perhaps the most serious threat to world peace and particularly ominous to Cyprus , and as such it should be considered carefully without the usual anti American jibes that we have come to witness so often .
The future of our island is also to be greatly affected should this threat continue to increase.
Make no mistake , Turkey will back the USA and she will delight herself in the knowledge that the RoC with a communist President will no doubt be supporting Russia.
I regret to disagree with your unreasonable comparison of Diego Garcia
"WHOLE "population 2 thousand , where Georgeas' population amounts to 5 million.
The entire length of DG amounts to 60 kilometres , hardly a justified equation.
The current situation in Russia is extremely dangerous and could erupt into a major conflict , lets make sure that we do not again in our history make the mistake of underestimating the resolve of the Western world.
In this instance , I can understand Russian objections to the employment of military arsenal in nations that were part of the old Soviet Union. I also understand that Georgia acted totaly irresponsibly and amateurish in anticipating a zero reaction from Russia.
Further developments are adding fuel to an already explosive situation with Ukraine yesterday offering to create a joint missile defence network with the West amid fears that its port city of Sebastopol, home of the Russian Black Sea fleet, could become the next flash point between Russia and its former satellites.
The Ukrainian offer, which means its early warning radar stations could become part of the West’s civil defence system, will further damage poor relations between Kiev and Moscow.
Ukraine, which to the fury of Russia is looking towards Europe and membership of Nato, announced last week that it would require the Russian fleet to seek permission whenever ships entered its territorial waters.
Let us consider the implications of our position as regards the interests of our nation , Cyprus , with British bases and Turkish occupation forces , the last thing we want to do is to send the West the wrong message.
Finaly let us just for once restrain our inclination to hit at America at every occasion.
-
miltiades - Leading Contributor
- Posts: 19837
- Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2006 10:01 pm
by CopperLine » Sun Aug 17, 2008 2:52 pm
Militiades
Please catch up with the twenty-first century. You say :
The Russian presidency, premiership and assembly is vehemently anti-communist. Putin and Medvedev have made something of a name for themselves in ordering the police and security services in Russia to beat up and detain communists whenever the opportunity arises (and even when the opportunity doesn't arise).
It is not anti-American to point out the laughable and rank hypocrisy of a US president and secretary of state talking about respect for territorial integrity, opposing regime change, and the limits of humanitarian intervention.
Please catch up with the twenty-first century. You say :
the RoC with a communist President will no doubt be supporting Russia.
The Russian presidency, premiership and assembly is vehemently anti-communist. Putin and Medvedev have made something of a name for themselves in ordering the police and security services in Russia to beat up and detain communists whenever the opportunity arises (and even when the opportunity doesn't arise).
It is not anti-American to point out the laughable and rank hypocrisy of a US president and secretary of state talking about respect for territorial integrity, opposing regime change, and the limits of humanitarian intervention.
Did you see/hear Bush say, when asked how he was going to demonstrate his support for Georgia, 'I'll be sending Condoleeza Rice to Paris' My god, the Russians must have been pissing themselves with fear ! The Georgians must have thought 'well that's way better than a carrier fleet or a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles'.the mistake of underestimating the resolve of the Western world.
-
CopperLine - Regular Contributor
- Posts: 1558
- Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2007 9:04 pm
Return to Politics and Elections
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
© 2002 - 2015 Cyprus-Forum.com
