WW3 - If Georgia (aggressor) were at NATO according U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.4 videos
December 10, 2008 | New York City | Vetting explained
*+The Humiliation of Georgia (and Bush)+ *
Revisiting the "Battle of Tskhinvali"
By MIKE WHITNEY There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway. There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved. What took place in South Ossetia on August 7, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equiped modern army. It was a war crime. In less than 24 hours, the Russian army was deployed to the war zone where it chased the Georgian army away without a fight. Michael Binyon put it this way in the London Guardian: "The attack was short, sharp and deadlyBlowback from Bear Baiting
By Patrick Buchanan Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Nasser's blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili's blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours. Russia took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin. Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain, and America's lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli. American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight -- Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when they end. Russia's response was "disproportionate" wailed Bush. Maybe. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more "disproportionate"? Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi? Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing? When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, we celebrated. When Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo broke from Serbia, we rejoiced. Why, then, the indignation when two provinces, whose peoples are ethnically separate from Georgians and who fought for their independence, should succeed in breaking away? Are secessions and the dissolution of nations laudable only when they advance the agenda of the neocons, many of who viscerally detest Russia? When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed its bases in Cuba, dissolved the evil empire, let the Soviet Union break up into 15 states, and sought friendship and alliance with the United States, what did we do? American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags to loot the Russian nation. Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we moved our military alliance into Eastern Europe, then onto Russia's doorstep. Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former republics of the Soviet Union are now NATO members. Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin's birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia's Black Sea fleet. When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia? The United States unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty because our technology was superior, then planned to site anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against Iranian missiles, though Iran has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs. A Russian counter-offer to have us together put an anti-missile system in Azerbaijan was rejected out of hand. We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey to cut Russia out. Then we helped dump over regimes friendly to Moscow with democratic "revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia, and tried to repeat it in Belarus. Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them. Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan, where Europe had opted out of the Cold War after Moscow installed those SS-20 missiles east of the Elbe. And Europe had abandoned NATO, told us to go home and become subservient to Moscow. How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior? For a decade, some of us have warned about the folly of getting into Russia's space and getting into Russia's face. The chickens of democratic imperialism have now come home to roost -- in Tbilisi. History of the conflict In 1774 Ossetia became a part of the Russian Empire. At that time, it hadn't been divided into South and North Ossetia yet. In 1801 Georgia also joined the Russian Empire. After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, Georgia became independent from Russia. As a result of the Ossetian nation's genocide (in which, according to different estimates, between 10 and 20 thousand people perished) Georgia annexed the South Ossetian territory. North Ossetia remained part of Russia. From that moment, the Ossetian nation started its fight for independence. In 1990 the Council of the People's Deputies of the South Ossetian Autonomous Region proclaimed the South Ossetian Soviet Democratic Republic. The Declaration of the National Sovereignty was adopted. That is how a new spiral of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict began. Between 1990 and 1992, thousands of peaceful Ossetians were killed. Refugees started fleeing to Russia. In 1992, 98% of South Ossetia's population voted for independence of their republic and for reuniting with Russia. After that, Georgian artillery and combat vehicles shelled the city of Tskhinval. The armed action ceased when the Dagomys Agreements were signed between Russia and Georgia. The Agreements implied a ceasefire and the formation of a Joined Control Commission for settling the conflict. The Commission included both Georgian and South Ossetian parties and Russia. On July 14, 1992 three battalions (Russian, Georgian and South Ossetian) of the peacekeeping forces entered the conflict zone. In 2002, the South Ossetian Parliament adopted a resolution requesting the Russian authorities to include South Ossetia as part of Russia. On August 8, 2008 President Saakashvili's regime started shelling the sleeping town of Tskhinval with weapons of mass destruction. On the night of August 8, Russian troops entered South Ossetia. On August 10, they pushed the Georgian aggressors back to the town of Gori. As a result of this war, 66 Russian peacekeepers and more than 1.600 South Ossetian residents with Russian passports and citizenship were killed. On August 26, 2008 the Russian Federation recognized the independence of South Ossetia. War 08.08.08. The Art of Betrayalâ is one of the first documentary Internet-films. This is the most outspoken film about the war, that started on the day of opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the film about the war, in which tens of Russian peacemaker perished as well as hundreds of peaceful Ossetians; it is the film about the war that turned out to be the doping drug for the rating of the republican candidate to the post of the President of the USA John McCain. The editorial staff of Russia.ru kept an eye on the progress of this war from the very beginning of Georgian invasion in Tskhinval. The camera crew of the TV-channel came into the destroyed republic on the 12th of August for the first time. This trip resulted in more than 100 footages about the destroyed capital of the South Ossetia, about the burnt villages, dead civilians, about the families left without their houses, about the people, whose relatives are missing. Russia.ru created a large base of experts, commentators and witnesses of the war crimes of the Georgian army. Finally it was decided to carry out a complete investigation of the events in the Caucasus, and the camera crew of Russia.ru headed by the writer Kirill Benediktov went the the South Ossetia again. The stories, that were told to the journalists by the witnesses of these events and by prosecutor's office of the Republic, clearly showed that the film about genocide of the Ossetians just can not have any other name but The Art of Betrayalâ The attack upon Tskhinval was preceded by a range of treacheries. OSCE and other international observers have just ignored the claim of the Ossetian part about the fact that the Georgian army is preparing the base area for the bombardment of Tskhinval and has already taken a strategically important high ground and for several weeks has been building entrenchments, blindages and fire trenches there. Exactly from these entrenchments fire was delivered to the sleeping city by the Georgian peacemakers wearing the uniform of NATO although they were the people whose duty was to keep peace within this region, but not to bring deaths. The traitors, the fifth column, turned out to be in the South Ossetia as well. And the most straightforward treachery was the speech of Mihail Saakashvili, who 4 hours before the attack upon Tskhinval calmed down the Ossetian people, persuading them that he doesnt want to set the war off. The film War 08.08.08. The Art of Betrayal is made up of 40 hours of the video-footage, brought from the South Ossetia by the camera crew, found on the YouTube Web site and other video- portals, sent by the Internet users, or taken from the video recordings of the cell-phones of the dead Georgian soldiers. For the first time in the history the war has been recorded by the video-cameras of the cell-phones. These recording give the audience the chance to see the attack upon the South Ossetia in the way, the aggressors (who were destroying the houses of the Ossetian people with the cries of joy) saw it. The uniqueness of these recordings is obvious: the journalists just are not able to film the very thick of the war, the faces of the murderers at the moment when the crime is being committed, the most straightforward and scary video of genocide. All this was recorded by the Georgian military men themselves. The mission of this film was to show the truth about this war to the huge amount of viewers, to the millions of people in the whole world. It is the film about those people, who set off this massacre, about the fact who backs Mihail Saakashvili, and who received political dividends from the genocide of the Ossetian people and from the western informational chasing aimed at Russia. In the nearest future the film will be translated into English, Chinese, Spanish, German and other languages and will be available for all the users of the World Wide Web. If someone of our audience wishes to take part in the distribution of this film, if you have the chance to help us, you can put the hyperlink to the film War 08.08.08 in your blog or on your Internet-page. It is so, because today any people, who are not indifferent to the tragedy of the South Ossetia, can become the participants of unmasking the lies of a range of Western mass media and of politicians, with whose connivance and assistance Georgia was able to attack the sleeping Tskhinval to frighten the whole world by the made up Russian threat It is so, because the war in the South Ossetia is not to vanish in history, is not to be forgotten and is not to become one the latest historical myths. It is so, because all the world has to know what happened on the 8th of August, 2008.iReport welcomes a lively discussion, so comments on iReports are not pre-screened before they post. See the iReport community guidelines for details about content that is not welcome on iReport.
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