Cyprus-Forum.com

[Filitsa]

Anti Americanism, socialism of the fools, Miltiades.

Bananiot, I do hope this comment isn't intended to help Miltiades understand my perspective because, if it is, clearly you don't understand it either. Just in case this was indeed your intention, let me make it clear that I'm not anti-American. In fact, I am a proud American citizen, born and raised, who chooses to assess American politics with objectivity and a critical eye, a right guaranteed to me by the U.S. Consitution.

[miltiades]

Anti Americanism, socialism of the fools, Miltiades.

Bananiot, I do hope this comment isn't intended to help Miltiades understand my perspective because, if it is, clearly you don't understand it either. Just in case this was indeed your intention, let me make it clear that I'm not anti-American. In fact, I am a proud American citizen, born and raised, who chooses to assess American politics with objectivity and a critical eye, a right guaranteed to me by the U.S. Consitution.

Filitsa , it seems it is you who has got the wrong end of the stick , this is what I said and you totally misinterpreted the meaning . Here it is again:

miltiades wrote:
Filitsa , every media source refers to him as an American educated lawyer , does it matter that much if he was a Harvard graduate ? He is most certainly not a wise diplomat, on the contrary more of a loose canon , utterly impulsive , with an uncontrollable temper that could cost the West a great deal.
America was quite in order with its response ""

[Bananiot]

No Filitsa, it was not meant to be for you. It was meant to be for many of my countrymen who would back anyone as long as this person is against America. We quietly supported Saddam and prayed to God that Ladden would seriously harm America. Many people rejoiced when the twin sky scrapers came down. I was talking about these sick people that abounded in Greece and Cyprus.

[Filitsa]

No Filitsa, it was not meant to be for you. It was meant to be for many of my countrymen who would back anyone as long as this person is against America. We quietly supported Saddam and prayed to God that Ladden would seriously harm America. Many people rejoiced when the twin sky scrapers came down. I was talking about these sick people that abounded in Greece and Cyprus.

Just checking, Bananiot.

[CopperLine]

This is a good article on the Georgian conflict and with some lessons and comments on Cyprus, especially for those on this Forum who mistakenly believe that Cyprus is at the centre of everyone else's concerns, including of Turkish concern.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-miscalculation-of-small-nations

(http://www.opendemocracy.net)

The miscalculation of small nations
By Fred Halliday,
Created 2008-08-24 16:16

The brief and vicious war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia has killed an untold
number of people and displaced and traumatised many thousands more; promised a lengthy
and abrasive aftermath; postponed even further the prospects of a settlement over this and the
region's other territory lost to Georgia's control in the early 1990s, Abkhazia; created new
enmities as well as poisoning existing ones; and planted seeds of yet furtherconflict. [1]
In the wake of the disaster, the urgent need is via an intense
effort of humanitarian mobilisation and sensitive diplomacy to
assist and protect thecivilian[2] victims from its continuing
ravages. Beyond that, a survey of the freshly ruined landscape
is needed to assess how theregion[3], the continent and the
notional "international community" can begin to pick up the
pieces. But between the immediate and the strategic, an interim
political assessment of this war suggests a lesson that relates
both to Georgia itself and to the political leaderships of other
local actors (and especially "small nations") who have found
themselves - or chosen to be - involved in military contest with
bigger neighbours.

The puff of ideology
Where Georgia[4] itself is concerned, the lesson can be
summed up in a phrase: pity (and of course help) the
Georgians, but condemn their leaders. For if most western
governments and commentators have focused on the high
politics and historical echoes of the conflict - from Russia's
excessive[4] military response to the implications for Georgia's
entry into Nato, from the role of the United States to echoes of
Czechoslovakia[5] in 1938 and 1968 - less attention than is
warranted has been paid to Tbilisi's contribution to the disaster.
In strict terms, the chief responsibility belongs to Georgia's
reckless and demagogic president, Mikhail Saakashvili. [6] His
precipitous launch of a brutal assault on the South Ossetian
capital of Tskhinvali on the night of 7-8 August 2008 is worse
than a crime: it is a terribleblunder[6]. More broadly, however,
the responsibility devolves onto the self-inflating nationalist
ideology whichtraps[6] Saakashvili and Georgians who think
like him. Here, indeed, is a local manifestation of a universal
problem. For while the particular circumstances of the latest
Caucasian war have been ablyanalysed[6] (not least on openDemocracy), it is important to broaden the discussion by
exploring the role that the nationalist ideology of Saakashvili's
type - with its heady mix of vanity, presumption and
miscalculation - has played in the modern world.

There is still a reluctance among many analysts of international
relations to believe that local and / or "small" actors in a political
situation - in this case the Georgian leadership - have their own
agency, freedom of manoeuvre, and responsibility (a flaw that is
shared by that particular kind of American - and of course "anti-
American" - leftist for whom everything that happens in the
world must by definition be the United States's responsibility: an
understudied genre of vulgar imperialism).

In fact, it is routinely impossible to make sense of almost any
conflict or region without registering how much local states,
opposition groups, or minority movements can act with
considerable autonomy in pursuit of their own interests - even to
the extent of manipulating (and on occasion deceiving) distant
and more powerful "allies". There are many cases during the
cold war, for example, where "third-world" states attacked their
neighbours on their own accord yet were widely characterised
as having acted on orders - as "clients", "proxies", "agents",
"pawns"'. They include: Israel in attacking Egypt in 1967, and
Lebanon in 1982; Turkey in invading Cyprus in 1974; Egypt in
attacking Israel in 1973; Cuba in sending troops to Angola in
1975; Iraq inattacking[7] Iran in 1980, and Kuwait in 1990.
The international context matters, but it is not determinant: what
is determinant is the reading of that international situation, and
the calculation of risks and opportunities, which the local
leaders and political forces make. Sometimes they get it right.
Cuba's judgment that Washington, battered by defeat in
Vietnam, would not stop its forces crossing the Atlantic to
Angola in 1975, was one such - yet before he took that decision, Fidel Castro[7] asked for a
detailed analysis of opinion in the US Congress. More frequently, the leaders concerned are not
so careful.
If the supreme responsibility of democratic leaders is indeed to protect their own peoples, then
the briefest of comparative overview can show just how pernicious the impact of the kind of
nationalist delusion displayed by Mikhail Saakashvili. His blundering into war overSouth Ossetia
[7] is but the latest example of how the nationalist obsession with the fetish of "territorial
integrity" corrupts their worldview: for it entails a multiple refusal to look at reasonable, humane
compromises; a misreading of international political realities; and a resort to destructive and
often useless violence.
Here, the flaws of nationalism can match or exceed those of religion, in a way that offers a
sidelight on the much-vaunted catch-all ascription of responsibility for modern conflicts to a
supposed "clash of civilisations" (by which is usually meant "Islam"). But South Ossetia and its
neighbours share ahistory[8] where Christianity intermingles with empire (Georgian, Ottoman,
Russian and Soviet) in the experience of its peoples. The chief agent of destruction is not to be
found in "culture" (in the guise of religion or some other vague source of identity) but in the
arrogance, recklessness and ignorance born of nationalist excess - which, to be sure, often uses religion and associated "cultural" offerings as part of its packaging. The problem is a
political one; and where "cultural" differences are small - as in Transcaucasia, parts of the
Balkans and Northern Ireland - the political conflicts[8] can more than compensate.

The wind of blame
The case of Cyprus[8] is illustrative in this regard. In July 1974 a group of right-wing Greek
Cypriots, with the support of the junta in Athens, toppled the elected (and more moderate)
government of Archbishop Makarios. At first it seemed that the world - even Turkey - had
accepted it. I was in Cyprus at the time, and recall well conversations with Greek Cypriots to the
effect that "The Turks will never invade. The Russians will stop them." So it went until the sky
north of Nikosia was filled with the transport-planes despatched by Turkish prime minister Bülent
Ecevit, out of which floated the Turkish paratroops coming to occupy the north of the city, and of
the island - where they remain to this day.
Ever since, the Greek Cypriots have blamed everyone but
themselves for this debacle: the Americans (who encouraged
the Turks to invade because they wanted a base in northern
Cyprus, at Kyrenia); the British (committed under a 1960 treaty
to defending the integrity of Cyprus and with two bases on the
island, who did nothing and so showed their historic "pro-
Turkish" bias); the European Union and the United Nations (who
have sought to impose unwanted solutions).
Similar miscalculations have dominated in the Palestine conflict.
Few nationalist leaderships have shown such little strategic
sense; ever since the re-emergence of a nationalist movement
[14] in the 1960s, policy has been led by militaristic rhetoric, a
misjudgment of the regional and international situation, and
misconceived sense of how friend and foes alike would react.
On two occasions the Palestinians, led byYasser Arafat's
[14]Palestine Liberation Organisation, found themselves with
forces, and considerable political support, in neighbouring Arab
states: Jordan (1967-70) and Lebanon (1970-82). On each
occasion the movement was carried away by delusions of
power and of allied support far in excess of the reality, which led
them needlessly to provoke local political forces and armed
groups; the result was the destruction of their local bases and
their expulsion from the country. In 2000, Arafat, faced with the
failure of peace talks with Ehud Barak, agreed to support and
promote a "spontaneous" uprising (the secondintifada) He
apparently imagined that, in so doing, he could break Barak's
political will and obtain more concessions: instead[14] he got
Ariel Sharon, who had ideas about to provoke a spontaneous
uprising, and did a far better job of it in September 2000.
The Israelis themselves are possessed of a military efficiency, a
strong international ally and a historic self-righteousness that at
times has served them ill; but they have also repeatedly
overplayed their own hand. They missed the historic opportunity
to resolve the Palestinian issue in the aftermath of the1967 war
[14] by withdrawing promptly from the territories they had
occupied by force. In 1982 they blundered into a war in
Lebanon, where they failed either to destroy their enemies, or to
instal a client regime, and ended up eighteen years later in
unconditional flight with a ferocious Hizbollah[14] enemy on
their tail.

For years the Israelis boasted that they had achieved complete
control of Gaza, only in the end to pull out, leaving the terrain
open forHamas[14]. Many citizens of the Israeli state must
wonder what the costs of long-term intransigence and
settlement expansion will be; and indeed if such a posture may,
in the end, not produce the very dire consequences that Israel
seeks to avoid.

The tide of failure
The blunders brought on by nationalist (and associated
revolutionary) delusion of the 20th century are indeed global.
There was the disastrous attempt by North Korea's then
president Kim Il-sung[15] to seize South Korea in a sudden
attack in June 1950, to be repulsed by a rapidly mobilised
United States expeditionary force. Only the massive intervention
of Chinese "volunteers" saved the communist regime from
annihilation. The inhabitants of Baghdad may also recall the
miscalculations of Saddam Hussein[15], in his invasions of Iran
(1980) and Kuwait (1990). These comparatively more recent
examples were long preceded by the classic such miscalculation of the Easter uprising[16] of
1916 in Dublin. On that occasion a poorly armed insurrectionary force was defeated, and part of
the city destroyed, by a British riposte as rapid and predictable as that of the Russian in
Tskhinvali.
True, such miscalculations about the capabilities of one's own forces and the reactions of others
are not confined to small nations. Most major nations have many and larger blunders to their
name: the Americans in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq; the British in Suez; the Frenchin Vietnam
[17], Suez and Algeria; the Russians in Afghanistan; the Italians and Germans in the 1930s and
1940s. The difference is that except in the most extreme of cases - notably Nazi Germany -
these large states have been able to recuperate their losses and in large measure continue to
inhabit theirillusions[18] of grandeur. Smaller peoples pay a higher price.
It is said that, when he took over from veteran Georgian leaderEduard Shevardnadze[19] in
2004, Mikhail Saakashvili told the older man - known in Georgian astetri melia(the white fox) -
that he had had the chance to be the great founder of a new Georgia, but that he had missed
the opportunity. Saakashvili‘s entrapment in nationalist delusion was always going to backfire. In
the moment of Georgia's latest agony, it will be little consolation that he has brought his country
into the modern world in a very different way.

[miltiades]

Very analytical and precise . Indeed we the G/Cs blamed the Americans and the British and presumed mistakenly that Russia would come to our aid !! As far as Greece joining in , well we had no doubt about that !!!!

[Eurasia]

It is simple.You cannot keep pulling a tigers tail before it turns and bites you.Russia in this case is of course the tiger.