Friday, August 08, 2008

Second Time As Farce

I planned to post a semi-humorous piece about the Olympics, given as how they started today. Even had the perfect setup for it, with this Reuters piece about three Brit athletes who posed in the buff to promote a beverage.

But the Emperor's Georgian proxies just had to start a war.

Reading the wire dispatches (like this one here, or here), I can't help but be transported back to August 1995.

After four years of buildup, with the overt involvement of Washington, the Croatian government launched a massive military operation against the Serb-populated areas that seceded from it in 1991. Attacked from all sides, outnumbered and outgunned, the Serbs were wiped out. The government in Belgrade, supposed to be the guarantor of the truce, stood by and did absolutely nothing. Many Serbians actually groused about "those damned refugees" ruining their summer vacations. Having thus "reintegrated" the territories it claimed, sans the population, Croatia has been celebrating the largest single act of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans as "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" ever since.

But what does any of this have to do with the homeland of Stalin? Maybe everything. The regime of Michael Saakashvili is an American client, much more so than Franjo Tudjman's ever was. Saakashvili himself spent a long time in the US, and was installed in power by a US-organized "Rose revolution" in 2003 (using the same template that was tested in 2000 in Serbia and later applied in Ukraine).

Here's the trouble: two regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, refuse to be ruled by Tbilisi. Their inhabitants are not ethnic Georgians. Russian troops have been stationed in both regions. Saakashvili's regime views this as "Russian aggression" - but of course, the Abkhaz and the Ossetians see the Russians as the only thing between them and the kind of "reintegration" that Croats imposed on the Krajina Serbs in 1995.

Saakashvili may think what worked for Franjo Tudjman in 1995 could work for him. After all, he serves the same master. Speculation by Reuters suggests that the regime in Tbilisi is hoping to "reintegrate" Abkhazia before the Russians respond. Except that Dmitry Medvedev is not Slobodan Milosevic, and Russia of 2008 is not Serbia of 1995.

Update:
Reuters now quotes Saakashvili begging for American help:

"This was a very blunt Russian aggression. ... We are right now suffering because we want to be free and we want to be a multiethnic democracy," Saakashvili said in the interview.

Saakashvili, whose country is pushing to join NATO, said the conflict "is not about Georgia anymore. It's about America, its values."

"I ... thought that America stands up for those freedom-loving nations and supports them. That's what America is all about. That's why we look with hope at every American," the U.S.-educated president said.

(emphasis added)


Pathetic.

5 comments:

CAP said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
CubuCoko said...

I honestly don't know what Zionism has to do with any of this. For crying out loud, "Russians" (Jews from the ex-USSR) are a huge political factor in Israel these days; how does Israel driving russophobia compute?

Britain pursued a Russophobic policy in the 1900s, which just switched to Sovietophobic after the Red October; U.S. policy after WW2 was pretty much inherited from the British Empire, which the American Empire sought to supplant (and did). It's not just the neocons who drive U.S. policy, it's also the "liberals," remember?

The cornerstone of the American Empire is the geopolitical theory of controlling Eurasia (remember Zbigniew Brzezinski?), and to do this they need to contain and weaken Russia, China and India, while counting on militant Islam as a weapon.

I think Israel fits into this as a focus for Muslims' rage and a check on jihadists, so they don't get too out of control - but as with most other Imperial plans, it's not working as intended.

Holbrooke is a Jew about as much as Sonja Biserko is a Serb.

Anonymous said...

I have trouble believing that the color revolutions were a vast CIA conspiracy to wrest governance from the peoples of eastern europe and central asia. The opposition groups who carried out the revolutions may have been supported by organizations in the United States; nevertheless, thousands and tens of thousands of people from each country stood outside for days to protest a bad election, and the quick departure of the elected leaders from power was essentially an admission of guilt.

Additionally, accusations that the revolutions were orchestrated by neo-conservative interests in the US or elsewhere are preposterous. The involvement of George Soros -- the antithesis of Bushean neo-conservativism -- is proof enough of this. Just because George W. Bush is glad that something happened does not mean that he _caused_ it to happen-- you're giving him far too much credit.

Anonymous said...

The Swedish FM has written a blog entry in English on the situation in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Georgia which does bear resemblance to both operation storm, Bosnia and the Kosovo issue.

http://carlbildt.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/the-principles-at-stake/

This blog entry is open for comments. People with good arguments can post them on the Bildt blog where they have a good chance of being read by the international elite, which Bildt himself takes active part in (Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission etc).

CubuCoko said...

@ oyevato: Oh, as if it's hard to dupe thousands of people victimized by bad governments into going along with protests against such governments? All the Empire did was train a small cadre of "revolutionaries" that would lead the way; once they were in place, the masses went along. Sure, the regimes that were replaced weren't much to look at; but that was not the point. The point was to install client governments. Look at Serbia and Ukraine now - the disillusionment among the people is rampant. When it bubbled up in Georgia, Saakashvili repressed it by force.

For the record, I never credited the neocons with the "color revolutions" - especially since I know damn well it was the "liberal" interventionists who developed the whole scheme. Not sure how you got that idea, but you sure as hell didn't hear it from me.

@lassejohansson: thanks for the Bildt link; his analysis bears as much semblance to reality as the mainstream media coverage of the Balkans.