Moscow Times today gives us a fascinating article by Simon Saradzhyan analyzing the Russian military’s performance in Georgia in some detail.
Of note there, that among the 171 Russian troops wounded was the general who was leading the entire Russian operation in Georgia, Lieut.-Gen.Anatoly Khrulev, commander of the 58th Army. Saradzhyan reports that 70 Russian troops were killed.
Saradzhyan and the Moscow-based experts whom he quotes give generally high marks to the Georgians for their high level of training and the success they had had integrating hi-tech western systems like drones (UAVs) into their operations. Saradzhyan writes bluntly that
- while the conflict has demonstrated that Russia can and will coerce its post-Soviet neighbors with force if the West doesn’t intervene, it has exposed the technical backwardness of its military.
The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military.
One of his sources, retired army commando Anatoly Tsyganok, said the timing of the original Georgian offensive against South Ossetia was well chosen, since Putin was in Beijing and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, were on vacation. Indeed, Saradzhyan wrote that former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had said the outbreak of the conflict represented “a major intelligence failure.” (That, contra the judgment expressed by Stratfor’s chief, that the whole affair had been a very cleverly spring trap laid by the Russians, which Saradzhyan also quotes.)
Saradzhyan describes the original Georgian offensive and the response of the Russian forces thus:
- Only 2,500 Ossetian fighters and less than 600 Russian peacekeepers were on hand to counter 7,500 Georgian troops backed by dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, according to estimates by Russian generals and experts. Tbilisi’s plan appears to have been to conquer Tskhinvali in 24 hours and then advance to South Ossetia’s border with Russia in the next 24 hours to present Russia with a fait accompli.
The blitzkrieg plan, however, faltered despite the personnel and technical superiority of Georgian troops, highlighting errors in the Georgians’ political and military planning.
… The Kremlin timed its response perfectly, because sending troops earlier would have drawn immediate accusations of a disproportionate response, while stalling further could have allowed the Georgian troops to seize Tskhinvali and the rest of South Ossetia, said [Konstantin Makiyenko, the deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.] The Russian troops established control over much of South Ossetia by Aug. 10 and then started to make inroads into Georgia proper, destroying military facilities.
The Russians also, almost immediately, opened a second front in Abkhazia.
Saradzhyan writes:
- The Georgian attack failed because President Mikheil Saakashvili and the rest of Georgia’s leadership miscalculated the speed of Russia’s intervention, defense analysts said. Tbilisi also underestimated the South Ossetian paramilitary’s determination to resist the conquest and overestimated the Georgian forces’ resolve to fight in the face of fierce resistance. The Georgian military also failed to take advantage of the fact that Russian reinforcements had to arrive via the Roksky Tunnel and mountain passes, which are easier to block than roads on flat terrain.
Another reason the Georgians lost was because the Russian military used knowledge gleaned from past conflicts, including the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its own reconquest of Chechnya. “Russia has learned the lessons taught by NATO in Yugoslavia, immediately initiating a bombing campaign against Georgia’s air bases and other military facilities,” Tsyganok said.
The above account is consistent with either the intel failure or the “cunningly laid trap” narrative. If the latter, the trap may well have involved luring Saak into launching his attack by demonstrably having both Putin and Medvedev be away from their desks together. It woukd also indicate a willingness to take a non-trivial number of casualties– among both civilians and troops– at the beginning of the war. But hey, compared with the levels of casualties the Red Army took during the “Great Patriotic War”, these casualties could well be seen by Russia’s leaders as extremely low indeed.
In the account of the war so far that Saradzhyan provides, the Russian ground forces and elite and commando forces performed well, but serious deficiencies were revealed in the performance of both the air force and military intelligence.
He writes:
- Nogovitsyn said the Georgians shot down four Russian warplanes. The Georgians said that Russia had lost 19 planes as of Monday.
The Air Force’s losses, including a long-range Tu-22, and helplessness in the face of air strikes by Georgian Su-25 attack planes and artillery fire on Tskhinvali as late as Monday should set off alarm bells in Russia, Makiyenko said. “The failure to quickly suppress the Georgian air defense despite rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve air supremacy despite a lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force shows the poor condition of the Russian Air Force,” he said.
The loss of Russian planes might have come because of the poor training of pilots, who log only a fraction of the hundreds of flight hours that their NATO counterparts do annually, Netkachev wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Monday.
Russian intelligence bears responsibility too for failing to provide up-to-date information on the capabilities of the Georgian air defense and air force, Netkachev said. As recently as three years ago, Georgia had no pilots capable of flying the Israeli-upgraded Su-25 planes, he said, adding that Russian commanders should have known that Ukraine had supplied Buk and Osa air-defense systems to Georgia and might have trained its operators.
“One general lesson that the Russian side should learn is that it is possible to build a capable, well-trained force in just three to four years, as Saakashvili did,” Makiyenko said.
It is pretty evident that Russia’s very own military-industrial complex will try to use the results of this war to argue for a much more sizeable chunk of the country’s budget than it has been getting.
Saradzhyan writes:
- Only 20 percent of conventional weaponry operated by the armed forces can be described as modern, according to Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, an independent military weekly. Yet the government and military have disproportionately skewed financing toward the strategic nuclear forces, which they see as the main deterrent, at the expense of conventional forces.
The lack of modern, quality equipment became evident when several tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down as army reinforcements moved from Russia to South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. Overall, however, the Ground Forces operated better than the Air Force, accomplishing their mission of routing the Georgian units, he said.
“The main lesson that Russia should draw from this conflict is that we need to urgently upgrade our Air Force, with a comprehensive general reform to follow,” he said.
Just one quick last note here. The Soviet military used to produce– and publish in Russian– some pretty objective and useful after-action assessments of various military engagements in which they or they allies had been involved. (Though they would usually attribute any negative judgments they expressed about the quality of Soviet arms or operations to those ever-handy “foreign sources.”) Today’s Moscow Times is not an “official” newspaper in the same sense the old Soviet papers were… But I’m pretty sure that many decisionmakers in Moscow would read an article like this one in it with considerable interest. I wonder whether the fact that it’s in English, and therefore not likely to be read by the great mass of Russian citizens, gives them more freedom to write about potentially touchy subjects like military deficiencies?
But anyway, from what Saradzhyan writes, it seems pretty clear that the Georgian war will have given a boost to the military-industrial complex’s lobbying power in Moscow– just as it almost certainly has done in Washington.
We do still have time to stop this new arms race in the field of hi-tech “conventional” weapons before it gets any further underway… But we need to start the worldwide campaign to do this now, rather than just letting all these arms manufacturers and their hired hands drive the agenda while the rest of us aren’t looking.
There are many better ways to resolve thorny conflicts than through war and killing. Let’s all try to be smart enough to understand that, and to start a huge global shift toward outlawing war and strengthening the nonviolent means of conflict resolution.
analyzing the Russian military’s performance in Georgia
Ralph Peters,gives his view about this war and power:
THE BEAR’S MILITARY MESS
There is a simpler reason why the Georgians failed to block the Roksky Tunnel – if they had, there would still be thousands of South Ossetians spread over the Caucasus Mountains (vide the Kurds in northern Iraq) and the Georgians would have been clearly exposed as the ethnic cleansers they are – leave it open and the South Ossetians disappear from view into North Ossetia. From the start Saakashvili’s whole strategy was based on ethnically cleansing the Ossetian population so that he could reclaim South Ossetia. Just like Karadzic, Saakashvili should be on his way to The Hague but that doesn’t suit the hypocrites in Washington and London.
Actually, on August 12 Georgia referred Russia to the International Court of Justice, accusing it of engaging in persistent racial discrimination in the areas of Georgia it controls. The relevant press releases from the ICJ, in PDF, can be accessed here.
Battling these matters out in court is ways preferable to battling them out with tanks!
I suppose Patrick Buchanan is not so popular here. Though I do not agree with him on many things, he has a talent for summing up the state of affairs in some parts of the world with extreme clarity. His piece “Blowback from Bear Baiting” over at Anti-War.com is really very good. Better than very good.
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=13305
Unfortunately Georgia also has a long history of racism against the Ossetians and Abkhazians so this is pretty much a pot and kettle situation.
And the Russians also have a long history of ethnic cleansing, one of the problems for the Abkhazians is that Stalin sent a lot of them off to Siberia and a lot went into exile in Turkey and then Stalin moved a lot of Georgians into Abkhazia so that the Abkhazians became a minority in their own country as Stalin created “facts on the ground”. While it doesn’t make Abkhazian ethnic cleansing in recent times right, it does at least make it understandable.
But none of this absolves Saakashvili of responsibility for his crimes. The sooner he arrives in The Hague, the sooner live will get back to some degree of normalcy in Georgia, because Putin is likely to keep Russian forces hanging around in Georgia while Saakashvili temains in Tbilisi and to be honest I can’t blame him.
This may have been covered in the cited article, but if not, it should be understood that Russia’s military spending is a fraction, a very small fraction, of that of the United States.
31 billion dollars in 2007, according to Global Security. 31 billion. What the US spends in Iraq in a few months.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/mo-budget.htm
Doesn’t this mean that the Russians would have to increase their military spending by a factor of about 20 to catch up to the US? Arms race doesn’t seem quite the right description of some reasonable, under the circumstances, increase in Russia’s defense spending.
And wouldn’t a neutral observer find the word ‘defense’ a bit more legitimate in the Russian’s case?
The Russians don’t need to spend half a trillion a year to deter the US, nor will they. The US military juggernaut has relied on intimidation to avoid real tests against the most cost-effective technology and the most motivated men, but that ended in 2003. Now it’s creaking. As a British-style capitalist power it relies on its Navy and long-range aviation to control trade routes. Russia and China have cranked out generation after generation of anti-ship missiles, which Iranians now have, waiting for the US Navy to blunder. I think it will be soon, it will be bad, and it will render much of the world’s coastline off-limits to our gunboat diplomacy. The first nuclear aircraft carrier we lose will be so costly that we will never recover our will to use them.
Other weapons are coming after that, cheap knock-offs of overpriced Pentagon killer robots, but built by the tens of thousands on Chinese assembly lines meant for electronics more advanced than have ever been mass-produced in the US. Some will swim, some will crawl, some will fly. Americans will pay for their R&D, unable to believe that non-whites can copy them, just as the racist imperialists who used machine guns to finish off Africa and Asia never believed that the natives would one day turn the tables with countless Soviet machine guns.
That’s if we’re lucky and nothing nuclear happens.
Stopping the new arms race that is sure to come from this Georgia exercise will be difficult because the most influential “hired hands” of the arms manufacturers are the members of the US Congress who continually vote for higher military budgets, increased military strength and the retention of needless military bases, and even add earmarks for useless stuff that even the Pentagon doesn’t want. It brings them not only campaign money but also bragging rights for the “free money” they bring into their districts. So stopping the new arms race means stopping these larcenous congress-critters, and that’s a challenge.
The US economy needs a boost, young Americans need employment and the arms manufacturers want more profits, so bring on the arms race, they say. The “Global War on Terror” will die a welcome death, and the “Global War for Democracy” will replace it, pitting the US against Russia and China. This leads right into the League/Council of Democracies proposed by leading Democrats (e.g. Slaughter) and Republicans (e.g McCain), new justifications for expensive corporate welfare.
McCain says “We are all Georgians now,” referring to this exercise which he may have had a hand in, to support his floundering campaign. Obama has been AWOL, on vacation while the world spins under his feet.
Those of who think this is needless, self-defeating extravagant and deadly policy need to jack up our efforts to implement the global inclusion ideas propounded in Helena’s “Re-Engage,” allying with those in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas to bring some sense to US foreign policy. If corporations can extend their reach globally, without national restraint, why can’t we? If corporations can over-ride national restraints on trade, why can’t we reframe the need for human security, in spite of the arms manufacturers and their hired hands, to bring the world freedom from war?
I was referring to the notion that if the Russians spend a little more money, then they are initiating an ‘arms race.’ That’s how it will be played.
As far as the anti-ship missiles go, history tells us that the US could not find Iraqi scuds in the first Gulf War. So it could not destroy them. And that IDF failed to suppress Hezbollah rocket fire for a month, for practical purposes, at all. Particularly in this context the one anti-ship missile that put an Israeli corvette out of action, or the other that missed the corvette but sank a merchant vessel farther out to sea. So if Iran has large numbers of effective anti-ship missiles, not to mention advanced mines and Millennium Challenge 2002 style swarming small boats, then an attack on Iran might reasonably be predicted to be a catastrophe for the US Navy.
It is not the infantry in Iraq who are most at risk. It is the large naval deployment in the Gulf, most of which is a ‘kill zone.’
Why this is not more discussed is a mystery.
Significantly Human Rights Watch is yet to find any evidence of the 1500 dead the Georgians were supposed to have wreaked in North Ossetia, but reports that the Russians have dropped cluster bombs on Georgian villages killed 11 and wounding many others.
Also there are two different videos of the Russians shooting at journalists doing their jobs in Georgia and wounding both of them.
Putin has really over-reached himself here as the reaction in eastern Europe will send them closer to American/Nato protection.
Also, he’s making McCain look good as the tv footage of Russian tanks rolls on.
That Russia’s conventional forces are relatively weak may be true, but that will only make a nuclear confrontation more likely. For Russian reliance on its nuclear capabilities will only get stronger because of it. Since the Americans insist on bringing advanced weapon systems, ballistic missiles, and American troops as close as possible to the borders of Russia itself (Poland and Georgia, a huge new base, Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo), the future is bleak indeed . If ever American and Russian soldiers confront each other directly, and fire is exchanged, nuclear Armageddon is almost certain.
There is one difference between the days of the Cold War and the present. During the Cold War there were many procedures and systems in place to prevent a conflict between the two major nuclear powers from escalating too much. These have all gone. Instead we have an American Empire which sees itself as the owner of the world, an Empire which has consistently blocked any real progress on nuclear disarmament (or any other form of disarmament), an Empire that was and is engaged in a permanent arms race, though there was no one to race against. It has used Russia’s period of weakness to expand the NATO to what from a Russian perspective can only be seen as a military encirclement.
This is the latest BBC World report since the so called ceasefire:
“As we watched, a column of Russian military vehicles moved into Georgia’s main port of Poti and sealed off the entrance to the military part of the complex.
Troop transporters, armoured personnel carriers and military speedboats are now lined up inside.
Russian helicopters, including a gunship, also flew to the Black Sea port, with one of the aircraft landing briefly.
The Russians stopped us filming and refused to say what they were doing or how long they would stay. This is at least the third time the Russian army has moved into the port.
But we know from what we’ve seen that they’re destroying Georgian military hardware.
“Rumbling of vehicles”
In the past few days, up to six Georgian navy vessels have either been crippled or sunk.
There are also reports of navigation equipment and computers being destroyed or removed.
Local residents in the port town of Poti said they were very afraid
The Russians appear to be, to use military jargon, neutralising the threat.
We managed to film a half-sunken Georgian coastguard vessel, which the Russians had blown up with explosives, or possibly shot with a tank.
We’ve not been able to speak to any Georgian military – there’s none around here.
We spoke to local Georgians in the shops and on the streets in the town centre of Poti – they said they were very afraid.
One elderly woman said she couldn’t sleep at all at night, fearing the sound of the rumbling of vehicles.
Earlier, we drove to a town called Senaki, about 30km (20 miles) east of here and it seemed the Russians were very much occupying it.
Russians appear very much in control, even some in rural areas
They’d certainly taken control of the Georgian military base there and it felt very much like they were in control.
As we drove through we saw columns of Russian military vehicles coming down the street and an artillery position with anti-aircraft guns.
The Russian peacekeepers are allowed to be inside Abkhazia and South Ossetia and in a buffer zone around those two regions.
But here, in Poti, and in Senaki, they’re way beyond – according to our calculations – about 10km (six miles) away from the buffer zone.
This is sovereign Georgian territory that the Russian military is moving into and controlling as they carry on operations to destroy military equipment.”
The Russians seem to have no idea of basic propaganda since they are conducting these operations under full scrutiny from the western media, and being filmed in their deeds while also being filmed actually shooting journalists when doing “live to airs”
Helena, do you have any comments at all to make on the “proportionality” of the Russian response?
What about your link to Moon of Alabama? He is now positing that it is not Putin who has been directing these operations, but President Medveded, implying that Putin is not a player at all? What do you think of that proposition? Does it stand up to scrutiny?
The Spectre That Is Hauntin’ Rio Limbaugh
Condi says, “You gotta get out now. We’ve signed a peace accord.” Now, if you’re going to say that — if you are going to say to Vladimir Putin and the KGB, “Okay, Saakashvili signed this thing. You must get out immediately” — IF HE DOESN’T GET OUT IMMEDIATELY, THEN WHAT? Some of this is troubling to a lot of people. I would throw myself in that contingent because IF YOU’RE GOING TO START THROWING THESE DEMANDS AND WORDS AROUND, AND YOU’RE IGNORED, WHAT DO YOU DO NEXT? If you’re not… This is really… The West and the European Union are demonstrating here that there’s not much they can do. You know, when this business happened in 1968, when Russians went into Czechoslovakia, LBJ had the Vietnam War going on. We had a presidential election at the time they did it, and didn’t do anything then, either. So there is more going on here than I think people realize. Just because it’s half a world away, people think it’s not all of that relevant.
The defeatist ratfinks of McClatchy handle the same topic as follows :
President Bush declared Friday that the United States and its allies “stand with the people” of war-torn Georgia against Russian “bullying and intimidation.” HE THEN LEFT WASHINGTON FOR A 10-DAY VACATION AT HIS TEXAS RANCH.
But God knows best. Happy days.
The Russians seem to have no idea of basic propaganda since they are conducting these operations under full scrutiny from the western media, and being filmed in their deeds
I should think the Russians were acting openly, because what they were doing was in conformity with the agreement. You have to read the agreement closely. Particularly the earlier versions, and the ceasefire agreement is only being signed as I write. Therefore not yet in effect.
What is not in conformity with the reality of the situation is the propaganda blaring out of the US and the UK. Yes, I regret even the BBC has been consistently propagandistic, putting out a slanted line, in conformity with the political line held for unfathomable reasons by the UK govt. They only recount Georgian versions of events, rarely citing the Russians, never questioning the Georgian stories, although they’ve frequently been shown to have exaggerated. If you want to hear the truth from the BBC, you have to listen to the 0600 news; the propaganda line is not generated before 0800.
I watched the video of one of the shooting incidents. The shooter did not appear in the film. Some unknown person fired at the journalist, who was fortunate not to have been killed.
Whose interest would it have been if she had been killed, on camera no less?
Not the Russians, certainly.
Alex
Who is the operator of the BTC (Baku Tblisi Ceyhan ) pipeline?
Who is in serious dispute with the russian shareholders in their Siberian oilfields?
Do you understand why the BBC is doing as it is told?
Who is unlikely to be buying Eurofighters from BAe.?
Chaps
Here is somone in the hot seat talking sense
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/16/turkey.usforeignpolicy
I look forward to Caroline Glick’s piece proposing the traditional military coup.
Frank, it was a rhetorical question.
I am just astounded by the way the US and UK, accompanied only by a few others, are welcoming a new cold war with open arms.
I understand the US needs to find enemies, the present ones aren’t sufficient to fund the arms industry. But the Brits?
We’ve just had David Cameron on the radio, boarding the plane in Tblisi, demanding sanctions against Russia. I am sure the Georgians had to google or wiki his name to find out who he was (people here may have to too).
The pundits are all saying, big mistake for Russia to provoke a confrontation. Thinking no doubt that the Russian economy can’t support an old style arms race. I don’t see it that way. The Russians, if they have good sense, as seems to be the case at the moment, could have a lot of fun provoking the US into excessive arms expenditure without spending much themselves. The issue of course at the moment for the US is “over-stretch”, as Helena has recently chronicled. Now yet another enemy. I’d like to know what the financial situation in the US really is.
On the other hand, seeing that the US position on the SOFA negotiations in Iraq is on the point of collapse (see Juan Cole’s latest post, but pursue it to Krahl’s report), it may be that the US will soon have one less enemy to fight.
I don’t recall bb being particularly concerned about the cluster bombs south of the Litani two years ago.
Nor proportionality, for that matter.
bb, what have you to say to this comment by Saakashvili:
“We have two Israeli cabinet ministers, one deals with war [Defense Minister David Kezerashvili], and the other with negotiations [State Minister for Territorial Integration Temur Yakobashvili], and that is the Israeli involvement here: Both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1011298.html
Alex
George Robertson the author of this piece used to be chairman of the Labour Party. His new job is explained at the end of the piece
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3e5519c-4c4e-11dd-96bb-000077b07658.html
The Brits are being very much rational actors.
Does Russia give a toss about public opinion in Europe and the US? No, because it knows that whatever it does will be treated negatively by western media and elites.
If Bush, Rice and Merkel expects Russia to leave Georgia while Saakashvili is saying things like:
then they are idiots.
As to firing at western media, that may be wrong and a bit stupid but it is nothing more than the US or Israelis have done and it does make the point to the European and US public, send your sons here and they will die and we won’t give a fuck. Many Westerners have this romantic view of war that it is only the fuzzy-wuzzies who die. In a war between industrialized nations, everybody dies.
The Israeli cluster bombing was a huge propaganda victory for Israel? Surely not.
On paper the Russians had a very good case for intervening. The people of South Ossetia and Agkhazia have a very good case for self determination or incorporation into Russia if that is their wish. A Georgian attack started it all.
But when you have journalists being shot “live to air”, cluster bombs on populated villages, tanks rumbling all over a (small) sovereign state, that state’s ships being bombed and sunk and Human Rights Watch being unable to verify Russian claims of Georgian atrocities, then you can safely say the Russians have nullified their own case. Helena’s silence on these developments, particularly on HRW, is very telling.
cc – it goes without saying the whole thing was an Israeli plot. Most probably it was Israelis dressed as Russian soldiers who were shooting off camera at the journalists? Nevertheless the journos themselves believe they were Russians, so that is the story.
The USA and its acolytes hate any free people, Russia & China are free of the tyrannical Plutocratic Regime in the USA, the same USA who invade other peoples countries with regularity of Iraq, Afghanistan to mention a few, The afore mentioned countries and many more including Russia, Vietnam, whose blood is cheap in fact it is not human to the Plutocratic Regime in the USA who think of themselves as Gods above the law. Europeans should be worried as these US plutocratic ruling classes will take control of Europe and lead it do destruction in their wars against invented threats.
The Russians dropped some number of anti-tank cluster bombs, 30 bomblets each, on Gori. Presumably on tanks, or Grad rocket launchers, or something. To reach the estimated Israeli 2 million bomblets dropped in Lebanon in a few days at the very end of that war the Russians would have had to drop, let’s see, about 60,000 bombs on Georgia. They probably didn’t because they are backward as well as perfidious, and only had a few. They did have anti-personnel cluster bombs, with 150 bomblets each, much better for killing civilians, and rendering large areas of land unsafe to walk on, and would only have had to drop 12,000 of those to match the Israelis. But they didn’t drop any, it seems. Probably a trick, given their well acknowledged perfidy. And they are not a democracy either.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/08/russia-used-c-2.html
news report: The powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John Murtha, quickly seized on the Russia situation this week, saying that it indicates the Russians see the toll that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking on the U.S. military.
“We’ve spent so many resources and so much attention on Iraq that we’ve lost sight of future threats down the road. The current conflict between Russia and Georgia is a perfect example,” said Rep. Murtha during a recent visit to his district.
Some Wall Street stock analysts early on saw the invasion as reason to make bullish calls on the defense sector. A report from JSA Research in Newport, R.I., earlier in the week called the invasion “a bell-ringer for defense stocks.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121884933721146317.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Hellena, as usual your site eases my soul as I look upon the destroyed state of this my adopted homeland as per Richard Frank’s wonderful book on Republican Conservatives: THE WRECKING CREW. I append a response to Prof. Rogers, whom we both admire, on the “when it rains it pours” globalism of the Bush Administration. I think it fits here and would love to know your thoughts on the what goes around comes around perspective I offer:
I would remind Prof. Rogers that the Bush Administration has justified its pre and post-9/11 thuggery as based on “GLOBALISM.” And so, I might point out, on a round globe, WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND. Israel, which dominates the Georgian government with three Israeli passport holders in the Georgian President’s Ministerial Cabinet, quickly realized how its influence might backfire and it withdrew it weapons and advisers immediately upon collapse of Georgian forces. The US was not so quick and I am told 6 American casualties resulted. Thuggery in a global setting invites and justifies thuggery. Bush should have learned that from his meetings with Putin. However, being chemically impaired for so long and offered advice only by his mediocre loyal “girl Friday” SecState, he suffers from a one point in time and space mind set…sort of like a Great White shark spotting a kill. The biggest tragedy is that, we now know, McCain’s top advisers, registered foreign agents for Georgia, thought that encouraging Saakishvilli to act now would draw national attention away from McCain’s cognitive deficiencies and to his dramatic : “we are all Georgians now” mis-stated nationalism babble– like his POW account plagiarized from novels. The Georgians were well aware of how, when in March 2006 PM Olmert came to beg for an extra $10 billions to shore up Israel’s failing economy, in return Bush demanded that Israel attack Lebanon–>Syria–>Iran, knowing full well that Israel would be deep in poop by the time it got to Iran. Then, to stave off “an Ally’s defeat,” Bush would make an emergency executive order to attack Iran. Though the Israeli Air Force failed to clear the way for IDF land forces (killing far more innocent civilians than Hezbollah militants) and Olmert was mensch enough to pull out and stop the hopeless killing of young Israeli men for Bush, Saakashvilli this time had the illusion that if he moved on South Ossetia with a murderous made in USA and Israel firepower assault, the US, hence NATO, would have no choice but to come in and save him before Russia retaliated. Since McCain’s foreign policy advisers are nothing but neocon influence peddling arms profiteers and have no strategic understanding, they only saw this as a great chance to force the nation on the message dummy McCain was mouthing from the throat of his neocon mender ventriloquist Senator Lieberman.
All this sums up to the obvious: you can’t treat the planet as a presidential campaign gimmick, even when you have a fool as a client. Events catch up with you. Now the Republican global-pay-to-play team is in damage control. But, once again, thanks to the the Republican-Right that Richard Frank so well describes in his book as the “Wrecking Crew,” America is hobbled into a defeat. A defeat that is as “victory bound” as our surge in Iraq that got the Iraqis to unite on one point: GET THE US TROOPS THE HELL OUT. And all this is with: (1) NO oil deal with US but with China, (2) NO territorial deal, (3) NO Iran out of Iraq, (4) NO independence of American Command tactical decisions, (5) NO immunity for casualties from and crimes by US citizens and forces in Iraq. Meanwhile Kharzai, the Afghan President, has been damning the American blind use of air power in his country and here too we may have the SOFA pulled out from under us as in Iraq!
I guess Bush may escape prosecution by Murkese, his own ultra-Zionist Attorney General that stands with the neocons. But the Muse of History Cleo is one prosecutor Bush will never escape: even if not written on his tombstone, he will forever be remembered as the president who sought to cover incompetence with criminality. Yet, the fault is ours, the boomer generation suffering from the “ain’t my kid going to Iraq [or anywhere else where there’s combat] disconnect syndrome,” that out of fear and in utter bravado sought to cover-up our panic by putting a cheerleader of dubious manhood as captain of the football team.