Russia Invades Georgia, Levels Cities

[FOTD]

Cannon? You out there? Where's your drum beat? On vacation?


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#26145967
Rachel Maddow totally nails McCain for his knee-jerk embrace of military solutions. "The neocon position has been that using military force is something that is precise, that has predictable consequences, it always gets us what we want, and no Americans die. And they've got this magical idea of American military omnipotence, that we can use our military anywhere to accomplish any sort of objective and there will never be any sort of blow back. Americans just don't believe it anymore. It's a fairy tale." [quote from last minute of commentary]

 Oh the irony when it comes to the Repiglican Potty.

Unless you've vacated, I'd watch it.

FOTD is a patriot..... NOT a Fascist.

[we vs us]

BP shuts pipeline on fears of Georgian instability:

 

quote: BP shut down a pipeline carrying Caspian oil from Azerbaijan to the Georgian Sea on Tuesday citing concern about security in Georgia.  Toby Odone, a BP spokesman, said the 150,000 barrels a day pipeline from Baku to Supsa on the Georgian Black Sea had been closed as a “security precaution.”

 -snip-

Mr Odone said BP was unaware of any attacks on oil and gas pipelines in Georgia despite Georgian claims that Russian warplanes had bombed the pipelines.

“We always knew the region was unstable and we will just have to wait and see what happens,” he said

-snip-

“Recent escalation in the military engagement between Russia and Georgia poses a threat to certain key oil and gas pipelines which transit Georgia, the IEA said in a report issued shortly before Russia declared a ceasefire in Georgia.

The pipelines, built by foreign consortia with strong political backing from the US, have eased Russia’s stranglehold over oil and gas exports from the landlocked Caspian region.

I'm not usually an oil conspiracy theorist, but this one's just jumping off the page at me.  Welcome to the 21st century version of the Great Game.

[cannon_fodder]

Apparently wrong again FOTD:

quote:, Georgia (AP) — Russian troops and paramilitaries rolled into the strategic Georgian city of Gori on Wednesday, apparently violating a truce designed to end the conflict that has uprooted tens of thousands and scarred the Georgian landscape.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gDNLWfQWKrQc48pITBUg9KT_6oVwD92HIM080

Russia rolled more tanks into Gori, of course they denied it... until the AP played video footage.  Then they admitted it and pulled back, taking up positions just outside the city (about 15 miles from South Ossetia).

They also entirely hold the Western province and have "disarmed" the Georgian military there, also after the cease fire went into effect.

Boats have been set on fire in the Black Sea harbor.

Russia essentially has now said that we either give up on Georgia or they will not help us with N. Korea and Iran in re the nuclear issues.  Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine have all condemned Russia, along with the EU, UN and most EU nations.  Belarus has even withheld support (they are part of the Russian Federation technically).

Russia has what it wants, by taking more they can "negotiate" to keep exactly what they want.  Though it appears they will fail in their quest to get or destroy the pipeline.

[FOTD]

quote:Originally posted by cannon_fodder

Apparently wrong again FOTD:

quote:, Georgia (AP) — Russian troops and paramilitaries rolled into the strategic Georgian city of Gori on Wednesday, apparently violating a truce designed to end the conflict that has uprooted tens of thousands and scarred the Georgian landscape.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gDNLWfQWKrQc48pITBUg9KT_6oVwD92HIM080

Russia rolled more tanks into Gori, of course they denied it... until the AP played video footage.  Then they admitted it and pulled back, taking up positions just outside the city (about 15 miles from South Ossetia).

They also entirely hold the Western province and have "disarmed" the Georgian military there, also after the cease fire went into effect.

Boats have been set on fire in the Black Sea harbor.

Russia essentially has now said that we either give up on Georgia or they will not help us with N. Korea and Iran in re the nuclear issues.  Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine have all condemned Russia, along with the EU, UN and most EU nations.  Belarus has even withheld support (they are part of the Russian Federation technically).

Russia has what it wants, by taking more they can "negotiate" to keep exactly what they want.  Though it appears they will fail in their quest to get or destroy the pipeline.

I'm not wrong....I'm the devil's advocate!

It's our administration that's wrong! US troops to fly in to McGeorgia

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/us-troops-to-fly-in-to-georgia-893917.html

Where the hell is Dumbya gonna get troops? Out of his arse?

Starting a war with Russia will certainly be about a 70 year war. Something McCain will relish. Real men go to Moscow. Just ask Hitler or Napoleon. Since we have global warming, our troops won't have to face the -20 degree weather; it will only be -2....


Stupidest administration ever!

[FOTD]

Here Cannon:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5462

Russia and Georgia: All About Oil

And here from one of your favorite sources:
Georgia -- A Blow to US Energy
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,572053,00.html

The Pipeline War 8-8-08

Placing these events into wider context is important to fully understand their complexity. Articles such as this one should be read and considered to avoid myopic thinking.

 In other words, in Eurasia, the Middle East and Central Asia, it's always about oil. Let's try to get past that level of analysis. Shall we?

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by FOTD

Here Cannon:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5462

Russia and Georgia: All About Oil

And here from one of your favorite sources:
Georgia -- A Blow to US Energy
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,572053,00.html

The Pipeline War 8-8-08

Placing these events into wider context is important to fully understand their complexity. Articles such as this one should be read and considered to avoid myopic thinking.

 In other words, in Eurasia, the Middle East and Central Asia, it's always about oil. Let's try to get past that level of analysis. Shall we?

Two comments:

Op-Ed

and

Op-Ed

Must be so because one columnist thinks it's so.

[FOTD]

Come now. Only the jingoistic would have reason to believe otherwise....op-ed? So what?

MORE....

"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 come..."

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

"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."

"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."



You have got to really dig around the MSM anymore. They don't report they just entertain.

PAY ATTENTION KIDDIES!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#26186565
"we are all Georgians." McCain (R-Idiot)
 We are not, McShame.

The anti olympics!Oh my gawd...it's 3 AM
"Oh war...it's just gawds way of teaching Americans geography...." J. Stewart

McCain sends Lieberman and Graham to McGeorgia
http://lonesomemongoose.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/mccain-sends-lieberman-and-graham-to-georgia/

"But considering that one of the main lines of attack Republicans are pushing against Obama these days is that he’s presumptuously declared himself president before Election Day, it’s a little curious that the GOP nominee thinks sending campaign surrogates to visit the war is a good idea."

Too many chefs....err, chiefs.

I liked my country better when it had principles and moral authority.

[FOTD]

More higher education on McGeorgia!:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080812_georgia_war_a_neocon_election_ploy/

Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?
By Robert Scheer

"Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann 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.

Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a “revanchist Russia” that should once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people.

How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori they would have found a museum still honoring the local boy, who made good by seizing control of the Russian revolution. Indeed five Russian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori’s Stalin Square on Tuesday.

It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the United States, which championed Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, now is ignoring Georgia’s invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces.

For McCain to so fervently embrace Scheunemann’s neoconservative line of demonizing Russia in the interest of appearing tough during an election campaign is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly irresponsible. "

[Gaspar]

My conspiracies can beat-up your conspiracies.

Nice hit into left field prieten de la diavolul.

[FOTD]

Another op-ed you can't find in Dumbf*ckistan.

Except at TNF: Op-Ed Columnist
Russia Is Not Jamaica
 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17dowd.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin            

 By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 16, 2008
WASHINGTON

America’s back in the cold war and W.’s back on vacation.

Talk about your fearful symmetry.

After eight years, the president’s gut remains gullible. He’ll go out as he came in — ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

He has spent 469 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there’s still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster.

As Russian troops continued to manhandle parts of Georgia on Friday, President Bush chastised Russian leaders that “bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century” — and then flew off to Crawford.

His words might have carried more weight if he, Cheney and Rummy had not kicked off the 21st century with a ham-fisted display of global bullying and intimidation modeled after Sherman’s march through the other Georgia.

We knew we could count on the cheerleader in chief to be jumping around like a kid in Beijing with bikini-clad beach volleyball players while the Re-Evil Empire was sending columns of tanks into its former republic. (Georgia made the mistake of baiting the bear.)

If only W. had taken the rest of his presidency as seriously as he’s taken his sports outings.

When I interviewed him at the start of his first presidential run in 1999, he took an obvious shot and told me, “I believe the big issues are going to be China and Russia.”

But after 9/11, he let Cheney, Rummy and the neocons gull him into a destructive obsession with Iraq. While America has been bogged down and bled dry, China and Russia are plumping up. China has bought so much of America that we’d be dead Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires — all through our addiction to oil.

What was so galling about watching W.’s giddy sightseeing at the Olympics was that it underscored China’s rise as a superpower and, thanks to the administration’s derelict foreign and economic policies, America’s fade-out. It’s as though China has become us and we’ve become Europe. Like Russia, China has also been showing jagged authoritarian ways and ignoring America’s preaching, including W.’s tame criticism as he flew into Beijing to revel in the spectacle of China’s ascension.

Despite his 1999 prediction that Russia and China would be key to security in the world, W. never bothered to study up on them. In 2006, at the Group of Eight summit meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, a microphone caught some of the inane remarks of W. to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao.

“This is your neighborhood,” W. said. “It doesn’t take you long to get home. How long does it take you to get home? Eight hours? Me, too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country.”

President Bush and his Russian “expert” Condi have played it completely wrong with Russia from the start. W. saw a “trustworthy” soul in a razor-eyed K.G.B. agent who has never been a good guy for a single hour. Now the Bush crowd, which can do nothing about it, is blustering about how Russian aggression “must not go unanswered,” as Cheney put it. (W.’s other Russian expert, Bob Gates, was, as always, the only voice of realism, noting, “I don’t see any prospect for the use of military force by the United States in this situation.”)

The Bush administration may have a sentimental attachment to Georgia because it sent 2,000 troops to Iraq as part of the fig-leaf Coalition of the Willing, and because Poppy Bush and James Baker were close to Georgia’s first president, Eduard Shevardnadze.

But with this country’s military and moral force so depleted, the Bushies can hardly tell Russia to stop doing what they themselves did in Iraq: unilaterally invade a country against the will of the world to scare the bejesus out of some leaders in the region they didn’t like.

W. and Condi are suddenly waking up to how vicious Vladimir is. In a press conference with Condi on Friday, Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, chided the West for enabling Russia to resume its repressive tactics.

“Unfortunately, today we are looking evil directly in the eye,” he said. “And today this evil is very strong, very nasty and very dangerous, for everybody, not only for us.”

As Michael Specter, the New Yorker writer who has written extensively about Russia, observed: “There was a brief five-year period when we could get away with treating Russia like Jamaica — that’s over. Now we have to deal with them like grown-ups who have more nuclear weapons than anybody except us.”

[FOTD]

Putin blames US for Georgia role

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7586605.stm

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the US of provoking the conflict in Georgia, possibly for domestic election purposes. "

No way....sarc/on

more:http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/29/putin.transcript/


Where's Fodder been lately?

[rhymnrzn]

How many things people give their heed to that are not worth the time of day? yet the biggest folly is thinking to play the men for their people by moving the battlements to and fro only to find the stakes are too high, and the game not fair.  May the sword ever be beaten into a plowshare, and the spear into a pruninghook.

[waterboy]

quote:Originally posted by rhymnrzn

How many things people give their heed to that are not worth the time of day? yet the biggest folly is thinking to play the men for their people by moving the battlements to and fro only to find the stakes are too high, and the game not fair.  May the sword ever be beaten into a plowshare, and the spear into a pruninghook.

In relations between countries, war represents failure. No responsible leader promotes it, and no military leader wants it. Its not a part of intelligent foreign policy. I like the philosophy of martial arts: prepare for defense with constant training of both mind and body but only use the disciplin when forced to. If only GB jr. had taken martial arts instead of cheerleading.[]

[Hoss]

quote:Originally posted by waterboy

quote:Originally posted by rhymnrzn

How many things people give their heed to that are not worth the time of day? yet the biggest folly is thinking to play the men for their people by moving the battlements to and fro only to find the stakes are too high, and the game not fair.  May the sword ever be beaten into a plowshare, and the spear into a pruninghook.

In relations between countries, war represents failure. No responsible leader promotes it, and no military leader wants it. Its not a part of intelligent foreign policy. I like the philosophy of martial arts: prepare for defense with constant training of both mind and body but only use the disciplin when forced to. If only GB jr. had taken martial arts instead of cheerleading.[]

My nominee for post of the day.

[altruismsuffers]

quote:Originally posted by cannon_fodder

If you don't know the difference between Iraq and Georgia invasions there you are not worth talking to. If you still believe we have occupied Iraq to steal their resources or otherwise oppress their people you're a fool.

McCain says we went to war for oil:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU2OgcnorBs