“In America, the Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column”-Bill Moyers
Georgia, a small country in the Caucasus, shares borders with Russia on her north, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan on her south and a small shoreline of the Black Sea to the west.
Georgia also almost surrounds three small independent countries, (termed autonomous republics), Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ajaria -all remnants of the Soviet empire. That these three maintain strong cultural as well as political ties with Putin’s present-day Russia, irritates both the president of Georgia and Washington.
The bru-ha-ha which erupted on the night of August 7th as the world watched Beijing’s Olympic opening ceremonies, involves Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia As has been the case since Bush Jr. sneaked into the White House, Washington’s Horatio-Alger version of events has scant relationship with facts on the ground.
According to our president, a terrorist Russia invaded a peace-loving Georgia, which was attacked by a tiny South Ossetia. This is the same picture outlined Aug. 17 on MEET THE PRESS, by Bush’s black sycophant Condoleezza Rice, who in the interview repeated: “Russia miscalculated, Russia used unnecessary force and Russia is undermining democracy in Georgia.”
Columnist Robert Scheer in his SF Chronicle piece on August 13th and Professor Michel Chossudovsky on www.GlobalResearch.ca, have given a different version. I Quote from Chossudovsky:
“During the night of August 7, coinciding with the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Georgia’s president Saakashvili ordered an all-out military attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The aerial bombardments and ground attacks were largely directed against civilian targets including residential areas, hospitals and the university. The provincial capital Tskhinvali was destroyed. The attacks resulted in some 1500 civilian deaths, according to both Russian and Western sources.” The air and artillery bombardment left the provincial capital without water, food; electricity… here is evidence that the attacks were carefully coordinated by the US military and NATO. Moscow has accused NATO of “encouraging Georgia.” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov underscored the destabilizing impacts of “foreign” military aid to Georgia.
Georgia has the third largest contingent of coalition forces in Iraq after the US and the UK, with some 2000 troops, which are being repatriated in US military planes, to fight Russian forces. (See Debka.com, August 10, 2008).
This US decision to repatriate Georgian soldiers suggests Washington is intent upon an escalation of the conflict, using Georgian troops as cannon fodder against a massive deployment of Russian forces. NATO and the US were involved in planning the attacks. In mid-July, Georgian and U.S. troops held a joint military exercise entitled “Immediate Response” involving respectively 1,200 US and 800 Georgian soldiers.
Robert Scheer in his Aug. 13th column (SF Chron) casts further doubt on Washington’s account of the Georgian struggle, pointing out that the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain’s senior foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheuneunann, had, until March been a paid Washington lobbyist for the Georgian government as well as one of the Neoccon Gang that had earlier helped get the US into the Iraq War.
Scheuneunann, Scheer noted “In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for NATO membership for Georgia, and a year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, accompanied McCain on a trip to that country where they met with president Sakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.”
Scheer points out that the ongoing demonization of Putin like the previous demonization of Saddam Hussein by the Neocons, is intended to restart the Cold War with Russia and help “fuel American militarization.”
Georgia’s president Saakashvili ordered an all-out military attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, to draw Russia into Georgia, just as President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, (as revealed in his book) on July 3, 1979, unbeknownst to both Congress and the American people, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorized $500 million to create an international terrorist movement to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and “destabilize” the Soviet Union.
This CIA’s “Operation Cyclone,” over the following years spent $4 billion setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan. Some zealots were sent to the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia where future members were taught “sabotage skills.” Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York. In Pakistan, recruits were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.
Movements on the Middle-East political chessboard are easier to understand if the international oil-gas behemoths are considered in the equation.
Georgia’s capital, Tblisi is conveniently located in the middle of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil-gas pipeline, controlled by British Petroleum, which brings oil and gas from the Caspian region to the Eastern Mediterranean and on to western markets. Israel gets much of it oil via this pipeline.
According to Professor Chossuvosky, Israel is presently negotiating with Turkey to construct a Mediterranean pipeline running down the coast from Ceyhan to Israel’s port of Ashkelon, which would eventually allow Israel to market oil and gas to India and China via her own pipelines. This plan helps explain Israel’s interest in Georgia.
Building and controlling oil and Gas pipelines by Washington has involved us in many Mideast countries beside Georgia and Iraq. Our military exercises in Afghanistan during the Clinton administration before we made an enemy of the Taliban, had been aimed at constructing a pipeline south through that country to Gwadar, Pakistan’s port on the Arabian Sea.
As noted by the Assoc. Press on May 9th, 2007: GWADAR, a remote Pakistani fishing town is being transformed into a huge deep-sea port to cash in on the inexorable rise of the Chinese economy. The port of Gwadar, a $250 million project for which 80 percent of the funding is Chinese, is expected to start operations later this year to capitalize on its strategic location between South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. The port lies near the Straits of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil is transported.
Since Washington created an enemy of the Taliban the US/NATO war in Afghanistan has morphed into a guerilla conflict, which we are not likely to win. French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie in their book “Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth,” claim the US objective in Afghanistan had been to access Central Asian oil reserves using the Taliban to help construct this pipeline from Central Asia south via Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. However, confronted by the Taliban’s refusal to accept US conditions, the French authors noted: “The rationality of energy security changed into a military one… at one moment during the negotiations, the US representative told the Taliban “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we will bury you under a carpet of bombs,” typical Washington strong-arm diplomacy.
Suffering from the arrogance of power, like the Red Queen in ALICE IN WOMDERLAND, Washington goes round the world shouting “Off with their heads,” making enemies left and right.
In Kosovo today, Washington having pressured our NATO friends in Europe to help pry this mineral-rich segment from its parent, Serbia, we find ourselves “protecting” another oil-gas pipeline which, coming west from Turkey and the Caspian, passes through Bulgaria and Albania splits in Kosovo into European and MEDITERRANEAN branches.
As Paul Stuart tells it in his “Camp Bond steel and America’s plans to control Caspian oil” (29 April, 2002) Camp Bond steel, the biggest …foreign US military base since the Vietnam War is near completion in Kosovo. It is located close to …the US sponsored Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. In June 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces seized 1,000 acres of farmland in southeast Kosovo … and began the construction of a camp. Camp Bond steel in a network of US bases running both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. In less than three years it has been transformed into high tech base-camp housing nearly 7,000 troops. There are 25 kilometers of roads and over 300 buildings. US military engineers also took control of 320 kilometers of roads and 75 bridges in the surrounding area for military use.”
President Eisenhower in his departing address warned us, our Military-Industrial Complex will make enemies for us around the world. Today’s positioning of missile defense systems near Russia in both Poland and the Czech Republic is an example of this power. Putin and his Russian people do not want NATO, the US/EU mercenary army signing up border countries once part of the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev was Soviet boss, Washington promised not to sign up these border states, but with Clinton and now, Bush Jr. things have changed. START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) signed between the US and the USSR under Ronald Reagan, (renamed START II ten years after negotiations resumed). In its final implementation on 5 December 2001, the US and now the Russian Federation reached the START I level of 6,000 deployed warheads. Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine, eliminated the nuclear arsenals left over from Soviet days.
In response to announcement of the US/Poland anti-missile agreement, which the Polish public rejects, we hear this from Russia: MOSCOW, (CNN) — Russia’s Foreign Ministry Tuesday Aug 19th, threatened a “military-technological” response if the United States deploys a missile defense system in former Soviet-bloc nations near Russia’s borders.
Both Obama and McCain, under pressure from industry, AIPAC, and the Pentagon, will be unknown performers until elected. Is it likely that Obama’s Democratic supporters, including Nancy Pelosi, many of who have been looking more and more like ” Republicans in Drag,” will be able to rescue America from its economic and political woes?
* Georgia On My Mind Words & Music by Hoagy Carmichael & Stuart Gorrell Recorded by Ray Charles, 1960
