I don’t pretend to be an expert on the former Soviet Socialist Republics but I do get the strong sense that Russia is so bloated with income from high energy prices that they are feeling very aggressive and looking to force the United States and Britain out of their former territory. The invasion of Georgia appears to be a gambit to take over control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Black Sea ports that are transit points for Caspian energy supplies.
Jerome Guillet has more on these issues, and I think his take is basically correct. I’m not as interested as Jerome in who has the moral high ground in this conflict as I am in its potential to open up a second Cold War, or possibly even a Hot War. It’s indisputably true that the West has been extremely provocative towards Russia. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union we moved aggressively into their former territory seeking opportunities to extract oil and gas concessions. We continuously moved NATO eastward and have been seeking to bring the Ukraine and Georgia into the NATO fold. The Bush administration tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and cut a deal to place anti-missile defenses in the Czech Republic. And, in what may have been the last straw, they promoted political independence for Kosovo. All of these actions have alarmed and angered Russia.
But the times have changed. Our troops are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and our economy is weak and our budget overwhelmed. Meanwhile, Russia is flush with cash and their troops are well-rested. With a lame-duck president and the country embroiled in a presidential election year, it was the perfect time for Russia to reassert itself.
Whether you think Russia is justified or not, this is an extremely worrisome development. One thing it shows is that the status quo will not hold if America pulls out of Central Asia. Russia is ready to reassert itself, particularly where energy supplies are at stake. And we know how oil men react when their assets are threatened. Don’t we? Any hope for peace in our time just got a little dimmer.
My worst nightmare is that a situation like this would arise while Bush/Cheney are still in office. If ever there was a recipe for disaster, this is it.
what’s particularly galling is that CONdi has long been touted as being the expert on russia. from an archived salon article:
some expert, eh.
she’s been an unmitigated disaster as SoS…and the ME situation has just gotten worse. the iraqi foreign minister has now come out publicly and announced that…The United States must provide a “very clear timeline” to withdraw its troops from Iraq as part of an agreement allowing them to stay beyond this year…[via reuters].
it’s fairly obvious all our adversaries, real or imagined, no longer consider the bush administration, and consequently the u.s., as a serious threat to their agendas. l believe they’re right.
163 days to go…and counting.
The invasion of Georgia appears to be a gambit to take over control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
That’s completely wrong. Russia has no intention of taking control over this pipeline because
This development is not worrisome at all. Russia has made its intentions perfectly clear. It will incorporate the rebellious regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia into its own territory, as those regions wish, and that will be the end of it, so long as the US gives up its lunatic idea to admit Georgia into NATO.
we’ll see. Hitler just wanted the Rhineland.
Do you know something I don’t know? Did Putin write his own version of Mein Kampf? Hitler made perfectly clear his intent to acquire Lebensraum in that book. Russia has no comparable ideology: just the desire to maintain its role of being the principal regional power, a role it has had for centuries.
I really don’t understand where this paranoia about Russia comes from.
The only way I can see this escalating is if the Ukraine decides to make a move, and make good on its threat to bar Russian warships from their base in Sevastapol. However, the threat seems carefully worded:
The conflict will be “solved” once Georgian troops are chased out of the two breakaway regions.
with all due respect to the links provided in your post we need to sift out Saakashvili’s propaganda trash talk – hollering like a 4 year old – about 1921 and 1938. Please view my comment down thread.
On July 10 Saakashvili was encouraged during Condi’s visit… On July 15 the war games began even with tensions – the tinder box on the border – underscored by Saakashvili’s pledge to retake the two provinces.
This conflict is not by accident. With Medvedev new in the saddle, not really in charge, and Putin in Beijing, this was calculated to be over in two days.
and just about now, Wall Street needed a little diversion…from the litigations by states’ AG against the big banksters – forcing them to buy back billions of AR toxic bonds at face value, estimated at $400-500 billion and expected to wipe out the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.
Kinda odd, topping the ligitation/settlements announced on Thursday …with all the negatives (Russia-Georgia conflict) on Friday the market was put up 300-points. Over the last 3 weeks (during US -Georgia war games btw)..the dollar miraculously gained to .75 on the USDX, and oil fell from US$147 to $115…with BTC pipeline in Georgia being threatened? in a war zone.!!!? Wall Street was firmed.
No market nervousness or wall of worry. Untypical.
Well planned old chap. Well pre-planned. The markets do not go up by themselves..they are put up. Three weeks in the making.
Hmm, the NY Times is reporting that Georgian officials are claiming that Russian forces have advanced into uncontested Georgian territory and are subjecting the city of Gori to artillery and tank fire. So far there are no independent confirmations of this, and Russia denies it.
It appears that this was just more disinformation from the Times. Here’s the first two paragraphs from the story as it appeared this afternoon:
The first two paragraphs now are:
Both the statements that Russia “directly assault[ed] a Georgian city with ground forces” and that an official from the Georgian interior ministry claimed that “the city of Gori was coming under artillery and tank fire” have disappeared. The headline “Russian Ground Forces Assault Vital Georgian City” has changed to the vague and speculative headline “Russians Push Past Separatist Area to Assault Central Georgia”. The second version speaks of Russia’s “first direct assault on a Georgian city with ground forces”, even though Russian forces were still “advancing toward the city of Gori”. Thus, even though Times speaks of a “direct assault”, no such assault has happened yet, but is merely speculative.
Here is what the Independent reports about this:
It appears that Mr. Utiashvili and Mr. Yakobashvili could not keep their stories straight.
This article from the Independent notes:
So at this stage, reports of a Russian assault upon Gori are just rumors, which the Times reported as fact.
Looking over the two first paragraphs as the Times now has them, “suggested that Russia’s aims in the conflict had gone beyond securing the pro-Russian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia” has morphed into “seemed to suggest that Russia’s aims in the conflict had gone beyond securing the pro-Russian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia”.
That the editors of the NY Times find it worthwhile to distinguish between the constructs “suggested that” and “seemed to suggest that” shows that they are the contemporary equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition or Pravda. And yet Booman continues to treat them as a reliable source of news!
And how are you to tell the difference between some military actions “suggesting something” and “seeming to suggest something”? I have no idea. But then, I am not a professional propagandist, which is something that cannot be said for the editors of the NY Times.
Did Russia invade or was it a response? The fuse in this conflict was years in the making…and four weeks ago Saakashvili was encouraged.
Imho this conflict goes beyond the BTC pipeline. You just can’t reason with emotion.
Once again, this conflict proves America has placed its bet on the wrong horse.
One question or two: Why are there 1,000 Israeli advisers alongside 1,200 U.S. trainers in Georgia?
There are many other views – that “America bears considerable responsibility”…. “what is good for the goose is good for the gander”
Russia has not acted like a client state, a reliable ally, or a true friend — but nor has it behaved like an enemy
I think that the root of the problem here is that there is a strong strain in US foreign policy thinking according to which any country that is not a US client state is a potential enemy about which one must be ever vigilant. And it’s not just the neocons who think like that — Obama and his foreign policy advisers do, too — this thinking is just the most pronounced in the neocons.
This certainly isn’t part of “the American character”, if one looks at American history through World War II. I think it largely derives from a nostalgia for the situation immediately after that war, when essentially the whole industrialized world other than the US was in ruins, and the US was the pre-eminent world power in all respects, not just militarily and in the entertainment industry, as is the case today.
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Jerome has an excellent diary up and he knows the Ukraine, Caucasus, Caspian regions as well as the BTC pipeline. The agressor this time is Saakashvili who acts more like a dictator than a democrat. The provinces South Ossatia and Abzkazia have no Georgian forces within. There was a truce with Russian peacekeepers in S Ossatia, an ethnic independent region with close cultural ties to their Russian counterpart North Ossatia. It’s a very mountainous area with small population. They have known wars with Georgia for the last 100 years. With no provocation and well planned, Georgia bombarded the capital city Tskhinvali. Within days it lies in ruins and nearly 2000 civilian deaths. The Russian peacekeepers were either killed or wounded. Georgia will be punished by the Russian bear and pay a heavy price for the demolitions. Russian news media calls it continuously a “GENOCIDE” and wants the responsible politicians brought to justice. Russia will respect the Georgian territory, except for the two break-away provinces. It’s clear the S Ossatian people want to be reunited to Russia and Abkazia wants its independence .. remember Kosovo?
There is no western news media in South Ossatia, so the view you link is western propaganda (Georgia and US). Before the fighting was underway, Russia made an appeal to the SC of the UN to no avail, as the US would not be interested until Georgian troops had overrun S Ossatia within 48 hours. Poor judgement as usual from Bush & Co and another major defeat for the US, EU and NATO. Russia has been provoked and will benefit immensely from this victory.
See my two diaries at BooMan (it’s also the more accurate title for your diary)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yes, Booman’s title is extremely tendentious. I’m glad you pointed that out. I haven’t seen any “traditional” media outlet use such a slanted title: one of those rare instances when the corporate media is behaving more responsibly than the liberal blogosphere.
It’s interesting how the West seems to be taking this in stride, and there is no hysteria at all that I’ve noticed. Now that push has come to shove, a certain realism has set in. As someone Jerome quoted said, “Nobody wants to fight Russia.” Because Russia let its empire go peacefully (something Britain was incapable of doing), people seem to have forgotten that Russia is still a major power.
Here’s another development: Russian navy sinks Georgian boat
I think we are going to see a Russian reprise of the US in Iraq under Bush I or Israel in Lebanon in 2006, although, based on what it has done so far, it looks like Russia will be much more restrained.
As I said, now would have been a damn good time to have counted Iran as an ally if we’d moved in 2003 and continued to talk after they helped us out in Afghanistan.
Not everything is about oil or pipelines. What is too often missed is the obvious interests in geographically close or adjacent areas.
And countries will meddle in their own perceived interests in their neighborhoods. There is no mystery about Iran’s interest in Iraq, Syria’s interest in Iraq, or America’s interest in Latin America (although this has always been a stretch). The real strange stuff is when countries take interest in matters beyond oceans and continents.
Nothing we say or do matters. It is not so much that American is ‘bogged’ down in Iraq as much as American has lost any moral high ground to be critical of what ANY other country does. Russia can do anything it wants. It can carpet bomb ALL of Georgia and who can say a word?
This was all predictable once Bush started blathering on about what the morons in the media called the ‘Bush Doctrine’, in which Bush claimed the US can assert its National Interests ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD FOR ANY REASON, WITH ANY AMOUNT OF FORCE (including nuclear weapons). If that is true, like the media and the government says, then Russia can certainly assert its National Interests in its own back yard.
I am going to be blunt here; Everybody in America, including `progressives’ need to STFU about what the Russians are doing until WE CLEAN UP OUR OWN MESS. We gave the Russians permission to do what they are doing, in an evil convoluted way. `We’, meaning every single American. Because we are all responsible.
nalbar
Aside from you, Booman, the only American I’ve seen refer to an “invasion of Georgia” is John McCain:
McCain Statement on Russian Invasion of Georgia