Mercury Rising 鳯女

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More on Georgian conflict

Posted by Charles II on August 13, 2008

It turns out that 1% of the world’s oil transits Georgia. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline had already been closed due to attacks by Kurds.

The Guardian is reporting that the Russians have introduced (or simply allowed) militias composed of Ossetians, Cossacks, and Chechens to pillage behind them. Young boys and girls are being taken by the militias back to Ossetia. While atrocities are the essence of all war, reports of noble Russian motives in saving the Ossetians should be taken with a grain of salt.

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9 Responses to “More on Georgian conflict”

  1. Phoenix Woman said

    August 13, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    One should also take pretty much any stories coming out of the region with a pound of salt.

    Here’s something you won’t see on the US TV networks:

    American broadcaster CNN has been accused of using the wrong pictures in their coverage of the conflict in South Ossetia. A Russian cameraman says footage of wrecked tanks and ruined buildings, which was purported to have been filmed in the town of Gori, in fact showed the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali.

    Gori was said to be about to fall under the control of the Russian army but the cameraman says the video was actually shot in Tskhinvali, which had been flattened by Georgian shelling.

    But of course, mentioning this interferes with the depiction of the Russians as Evil Huns and the Georgians (aka the clients of McCain operative Randy Scheunemann) as Noble Freedom Fighters. It ain’t that simple, folks.

  2. Charles said

    August 14, 2008 at 12:04 am

    Nor does the falsification of the location of the film mean that similar things haven’t happened in central Georgia. Luke Harding was in Gori. You can listen to his report. People shot dead, a village burned to the ground, children kidnapped.

    The Russians were b—–ds as imperialists long before the USSR came into being and collapsed. I’d be very surprised if they’ve improved.

  3. Stormcrow said

    August 14, 2008 at 2:02 am

    The Russians were b—–ds as imperialists long before the USSR came into being and collapsed.

    Charles, that pretty much comes with the territory and the history.

    Europe was like that too, until they had two utterly ruinous wars too many.

  4. Phoenix Woman said

    August 14, 2008 at 9:00 am

    A-yep. Oil is one of the major motivators here, just like in Iraq.

    And get this:

    Previously, [Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s senior foreign policy advisor] was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

    There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign.

    In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia’s membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

    Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

  5. Charles said

    August 14, 2008 at 9:29 am

    Stormcrow, most imperialists do horrific things. The people of India, not to mention the Indians of the Americas could tell a few stories.

    But Russian nationalism is almost 19th century in its glorification of brutality. The US has may have exceeded in Iraq the death toll of all conflicts of the last quarter century– in other words, is guilty of extraordinary brutality– but it has to hide what it is doing from the American people. Most of the deaths, however calculated, come because of malnutrition or inadequate medical facilities or at the hands of people with foreign names. The Russians don’t need the same think veneer of faux-righteousness, because “strong” leaders are so celebrated.

    _______________

    Phoenix Woman, although Scheunemann may have been the conduit for the promises that lured Saakashvili into a false sense of security, I find it hard to believe that the White House was not the source of the messages. Maybe Saakashvili is a total fool, to gamble his future on the word of an aide to a man who might someday be president, but not many people get to positions even like president of a country half the size of Ohio, but I kind of doubt it.

  6. Phoenix Woman said

    August 14, 2008 at 9:57 am

    Charles, in this instance (and many others), I see McCain’s operation as an extension of Team Bush. Hence the PNAC ties.

  7. Phoenix Woman said

    August 14, 2008 at 10:08 am

    Charles, pat yourself on the back: Turns out that Karl Rove is involved.

    So it looks like we’ve got not just McCain aka Bush II, but the Bush Junta itself, pulling an April Glaspie on Saakashviili.

  8. Charles said

    August 14, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Suspecting the White House of skulduggery requires no imagination at all, PW.

  9. Phoenix Woman said

    August 14, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Oh, I know. The thing to bear in mind is that they and McCain’s people are working hand in glove, on this and many other issues.

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