[CitizensTruth] ARTICLE-So Ossetia-Tale of US imperialism

[Geri Perry]

Some very short, first hand reports on "Russian aggression" that 
momentarily got through the censorship filter:

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Find-Freedom.htm?At=037114&From=News

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Find-Freedom.htm?At=037114&From=News

gerip



Walterb306 at cs.com wrote:

>

> All,

>

> Info is there, just being generally ignored by corporatist media.

>

> Hall of mirrors.

>

> Please share widely.

>

> Beverley

>

>

>

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/russia.georgia

>

> GUARDIAN.CO.UK

>

> This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression

> War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial 

> drive as local conflicts. It's likely to be a taste of things to com

>

>

> Seumas Milne

> The Guardian,

> Thursday August 14 200

>

>

> The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has 

> triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western 

> politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered 

> against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US 

> vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and 

> David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go 

> unanswered". George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a 

> sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic 

> government". Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st 

> century".

>

>

> Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that 

> in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have 

> it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of 

> hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that 

> blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised 

> Lebanon's infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in 

> retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?

>

>

> You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression 

> that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an 

> all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order" - in 

> other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the 

> collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian 

> bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references 

> to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it 

> claims as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several 

> hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, 

> along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: 

> "I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of 

> women and children," one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, 

> told reporters on Tuesday

>

>

> Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for 

> Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy". Well it's certainly 

> small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil 

> Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed 

> coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution". Saakashvili 

> was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote 

> before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently 

> described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently 

> cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last 

> November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases

>

>

> The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the 

> other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of 

> the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, 

> minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal 

> boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite 

> differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an 

> international state borde

>

>

> Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in 

> any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as 

> a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to 

> bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline 

> through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy 

> supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of 

> Kosovo - whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South 

> Ossetia and Abkhazia - and conflict was only a matter of time

>

>

> The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet 

> collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a 

> fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by 

> the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in 

> Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the 

> Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives 

> in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US 

> Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy 

> Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government 

> since 2004

>

>

> But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush 

> administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global 

> hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a 

> resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was 

> defence secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only 

> been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of 

> the 1990s

>

>

> Over the past decade, Nato's relentless eastward expansion has brought 

> the western military alliance hard up against Russia's borders and 

> deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread 

> across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install 

> one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of 

> colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to 

> site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted 

> at Russi

>

>

> By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, 

> but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia 

> by a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used 

> the South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should 

> hardly come as a surprise. What is harder to work out is why 

> Saakashvili launched last week's attack and whether he was given any 

> encouragement by his friends in Washington.

>

>

> If so, it has spectacularly backfired, at savage human cost. And 

> despite Bush's attempts to talk tough yesterday, the war has also 

> exposed the limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia 

> proper's independence is respected - best protected by opting for 

> neutrality - that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the 

> world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the 

> return of some counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of 

> adjustment also brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of 

> Nato, this week's conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation. 

> That would be even more obvious in the case of Ukraine - which 

> yesterday gave a warning of the potential for future confrontation 

> when its pro-western president threatened to restrict the movement of 

> Russian ships in and out of their Crimean base in Sevastopol. As great 

> power conflict returns, South Ossetia is likely to be only a taste of 

> things to come.

>

> s.milne at guardian.co.uk

>

>

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

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