Heart to heart and heavy artillery

Bush, the rich, alcoholic idiot, tried to pick a fight with Putin and Putin beat him over the head with a baseball bat

John Hemingway

Don’t you love it? Don’t you love the supreme irony of it all? Just as the Olympic Games are opening in Beijing, the pro-western,
US backed government of Georgia decides to launch an offensive against its in-everything-but-name independent “province” of South Ossetia.
Claiming that its troops were shelling the Ossetian capital city to “restore constitutional order” the Georgian Army killed over 1,500 people and essentially leveled Tskhinvali.
Among those who died as the world watched a British soprano in Beijing sing “you and me, from one world, heart to heart, we are one family” were ten Russian soldiers manning a “peace observation” post in the breakaway province.
Moscow was not amused and columns of tanks and heavy artillery were soon rolling across the border in defense of the largely Russian population. Georgia declared war against Russia and begged the USA and the European Union to intervene in some way.
The Georgian president declared that his country was “looking with hope” to the US. The armed confrontation with Russia, he claimed, “is not about Georgia anymore.
It’s about America, its values... America stands up for those freedom-loving nations and supports them. That’s what America is all about.”
Eventually, when Russia had routed the American and Israeli trained Georgian army it agreed to an E.U. sponsored truce.
Georgia had no choice but to acquiesce to Putin’s humiliating terms and at this point they can kiss any ideas they might have had of reasserting control over the two break-away provinces good-bye.
It was and remains unlikely that anyone will come to their aid. Apart from Bush’s utterly amazing (and hypocritical) “warning” to the Russians that “invasions of sovereign nations” would not be tolerated in the 21st century (he conveniently forgot about Afghanistan and Iraq), the Georgians can expect little else from their NATO friends.
In America’s new cold war against Russia, Georgia and its army are but pawns in the Great Game. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, US administrations have foster regional tensions in the Caucasus and beyond in an effort to gain control of the area’s strategic petroleum resources.
Promoting Georgia’s admission as a full member of the NATO alliance was a part of this plan.
Just as encouraging and then recognizing the unilateral declaration of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia sent a very clear message to the world and especially to Russia.
“We’re still the rulers of the world”, the Neocons seem to be saying to Putin, “and we can surround you with client states like Georgia or create ‘independent protectorates’ in Kosovo and Afghanistan and there isn’t a damn thing that you can do about it.”
The risk, of course, is that the Russians would eventually strike back, and when they did the intensity of their counter-attack must have been a rude reality check for the strategically challenged Neocons.
Bush, the rich, alcoholic idiot, tried to pick a fight with Putin and Putin beat him over the head with a baseball bat. Everyone has their limits and while it’s easy to start a war, once the killing begins, you never know where it will end.