AMERICAN LEFTIST
Are Wall Street fund managers and investors stupid enough to believe that a new Cold War is a good idea? Evidently so. Because that's the objective of the Georgian leadership and their American and Israeli supporters in the defense and intelligence services. As for the rest of us, they could care less. Why should they? We haven't done anything for a quite awhile to compel them to do so. We can, however, be certain that we will hear very little of the fact that the Georgian military has been trained by the US (so far, only in the context of allying fears that some US officers may have been killed or wounded during a Russian air attack), and nothing about the sales of Israeli weapons to Georgia.Read the rest here , and more - as the story broke earlier this week - here and here.
One gets the troubling sense that the US, France and Britain, among others, are going to adopt the same response that they did after the Israel conducted a campaign of air strikes upon Lebanon around this same time in the summer of 2006: use the United Nations to pressure the side subject to the attack to make concessions to the aggressor. The Lebanese victims of Israeli airstrikes, over 1,300 people, plus the prospect of subsequent deaths and injuries as a result of cluster bombs, meant nothing to them in the face of more cynical, abstract, geopolitical concerns of the imperialist kind, and the lives of South Ossetians will be equally irrelevant.
Last night I watched the BBC World News lengthy coverage of this conflict and noticed that neither the US training the Georgians nor Israeli arms connection was mentioned.
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ReplyDeleteThree quick things:
ReplyDelete- Some of us had a fear this was coming.
- In the news tonight on I think it was CNN, it was specifically stated that the Georgian army is US-trained.
- No member of the UN has given diplomatic recognition to South Ossetia and it is still regarded internationally as part of Georgia, so I object to the pejorative description of Georgia as having "invaded" South Ossetia. I have a lot of respect for Richard, but part of the reason I've drifted away from reading American Leftist on a regular basis is that, like some others, he strikes me as a little too ready to assume that whichever side the US supports in a conflict must be in the wrong.
(Yes, I know AP also used the term "invasion." I object to it there as well, for exactly the same reason: It predetermines the right and the wrong of the battle.)
As Putin has made Russia a more and more fascist state, Russian imperialism has been making a disturbing comeback. Russia has been intimidating former Soviet Republic and former satellite states on a fairly regular basis.
ReplyDeleteRussia's invasion of Georgia is truly disturbing and dangerous. The Soviets had sent Russians to move into the non-Russian republics to consolidate their empire in a manner similar to what previous empires had done. Now, those Russian minorities are being used as a pretext by the fascist government in Russia for imperial expansion.
Here's lenin, today:
ReplyDeletehttp://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/putin-wins-probably.html