Well the reality of the situation is that Bush pushing the Baltic states toward NATO is what precipitated all this. So you’re advocating Bush’s solution to the problem. When the Soviet Union collapsed we promised we wouldn’t push those states into NATO. So Russia doesn’t want Georgia in NATO so they did this. Your solution is to sign them up for NATO immediately. Remember all those revolutions they had? Orange, Rose etc… Bush had a lot to do with that.
What do you mean by ‘pushing countries toward NATO’? It’s not like the new joiners were sort of reluctant to join and needed cajoling - all of the new joiners were knocking on NATO’s doors from day one. Whether admitting them was a smart move is another question, but the main drive that caused for instance the Baltics to join NATO and turn their backs on Russia came from the Baltic states, and was inspired by what they call fifty years of Russian occupation.
As to those ‘revolutions’ - it’s true that the US, the EU and, for instance, George Soros’s Open Society Institute supported the opposition, but these were endogenous movements, it’s not like they were imposed from outside. Exaggerating Western influence, like the Russians are doing, causes us to ignore the fact that the move towards the West, towards the EU and NATO and the Euro and away from Russia is something that comes from inside these countries.
We need to understand that Georgia rocketed a city - they attacked civilians indiscriminately causing massive casualties. They did what the Serbs did, they committed a heinous war crime and there is no excuse, no provocation that justifies that and Russia was always going to respond.
Shattered city is a ghost town
This is uncontested. European TV, journalists and UNHCR confirm it.
Allegedly - and I expect it is true because they’d have to under the circumstances - as part of the surprise attack the Georgian contingent of the joint peacekeeping force killed their Russian counterparts.
No doubt other atrocities will be alleged and some confirmed on all sides. This is a brutal part of the world.
How the frack did they expect the Russians to respond? The Russian Army is not noted for its humanitarian outlook and no doubt has committed its own atrocities, as will have Georgian and Ossetian militias. But the Russians have not flattened Gori in retaliation despite CNN showing footage of the South Ossetian damage and claiming it was from Gori.
So please - no more romantic bullshit about plucky innocent Georgia. They are no different from the rest of the savages in that part of the world.
They are led by a lunatic elected in a rigged poll and heads a parliament whose elections, as I have already cited, were not judged to meet international standards.
And they broke a peace agreement to try and reimpose long lost control over an autonomous province they unilaterally decided to change the status of in 1992. Then they launched a vicious rocketing and shelling of a city and surrounding villages, killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians and creating a massive refugee crisis.
When people the West doesn’t like do this, we call it ethnic cleansing. So cry me a bloody river about the poor plucky Georgians. They got nothing like what they dished out. If we can’t see the situation for what it actually is rather than getting our Cold War tinted spectacles on then this thread might as well be moved to MPIMS.
Here’s a good article by one of Britain’s most experienced foreign journalists.
It is well worth a read.
Russia has played a superb game and left the West looking like weak, blustering fools. We have now conclusively demonstrated that there is nothing we can do to protect nominal allies well outside the effective area of NATO operations.
And given the dubious nature of our ‘allies’ in that region, given their propensity to go all brutal over poxy little ethnic problems they should just grow the fuck out of, why should we risk WW3 for them.
The only answer is energy.
Oy! Ironically enough when I was about to devote some time to responding to your post and elucidating further on my prior one, I happened to find this article on-line which I believe does a much better job in doing both.
I highly recommend you give it a read:
It addresses in much further depth some of the criticisms I brought up about American Foreign Policy from the days of the the break-up of the former Soviet Union, including the miss-handling of the NATO alliance as some sort of come one come all club for all of those who wished to punch the caged Bear in the nose.
Problem being, as I’ve already said a number of times, the Bear is no longer caged nor are we living the unipolar world of the early 90’s through Bush’s first term. Lot’s happened since – and likely number one in that list is the Neocon-fiction/mantra that “they can male their own reality.”
No. They can’t and never could. And to see that one only need to look around at the world (starting with your own nation, the US of A) as stands today vs how it was a short 8 years ago – I highly doubt that’s the “reality” they were aiming for. How about accepting the truism for starters and working anew from there?
Svejk Here from RedFury’s posted article:
Just because someone wants to join NATO doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to let them. There has to be a certain level of maturity and understanding on the part of a NATO member. They can’t go bear-baiting and expect everyone to back them up. In this regard, it shows that there was some wisdom in keeping them out of NATO in the first place. The push by Bush to get all these nations signed up and strapped in is a bit of a mistake. Pushing NATO right up to the border of Russia is just asking for there to be a conflict where NATO has no recourse but to get involved taking what would be a small region conflict and turning it into a large one, ultimately causing the death of NATO. NATO cannot afford the Saakashvili’s of the world.
Military adventurism? it’s a civil war. Which is why Georgia is not part of NATO. It’s not politically stable.
Yeah, I know. Now tell me what this has to do with my post, please.
there’s a certain chicken and egg aspect of your statement. If Georgia had been a member of NATO, Russia would not have attacked. But they’re not because of political instability.
The point is this crappy little states, still boiling over with their petty barbarous feuds, want to join NATO so they have a big brother to hold their coat and back them up while they murderously settle old scores.
look, I get that. I asked mswas in post #221 what he meant by pushing things and then went on to say that these states needed no pushing - which is exactly what seems to appear from redfury’s article - and also that the rose and orange revolutions that mswas alledges Dubya had a hand in did come about through political processes internal to respectively Georgia and Ukraine. These countries don’t need encouragement to resist and resent Russian influence and turn to the West for whatever they can get from the West. That’s all.
From the latest reports it seems like roving packs of the South Ossetian variety of savages are sweeping along behind the Russians. And the Russians are claiming their tanks went into Gori ‘looking for the local authorities to jointly organise the ceasefire’.
They are probably on their way to Tiblisi ‘to borrow a cup of sugar’ as we speak. :rolleyes:
Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind holds true it seems.
Yes but you see, just as the US won’t allow any number of countries to do as they will in what it considers its “Sphere of Influence” (there’s a long history behind geopolitical fact as you well know) neither will Putin’s Russia – something the larger European nations know all too well (Germany, France, Italy, Spain)
This article might help you connect the dots so to speak:
Moscow’s growing influence over NATO
Mind you, not that I am disagreeing with you assessment on the will of those countries to go West, but more to do with you own query “if it was the right thing to do.”
And specially in such a hasty way…I mean do we really want to be on the brink of WWIII every time a (per instance) Georgia wants to flex its borrowed muscle?
They received material support from the US. I thought that was sort of obvious as it’s been written about in pretty much every article on the topic.
My query?
to be fair, everybody is talking about that NATO is too big and all the examples of what might go wrong are based on a country that never made it into the membership of NATO. If any borrowed muscle was flexed by one of the Baltic states or Poland or the Czech Republic or some such, that’d lend much more weight to the things being said about:
I’ll quote this part of my original article in the interesting of yet again advancing both my criticism of the way unilateralism after the fall of the Soviet Union was taken as a fait à compli and the bullish (thoughtless even) way NATO’S expansionism has been progressing since:
– bolding mine. Much more at source.
Poland and the Czech Republic don’t fit that category. Note the Czechs and Slovaks peacefully went their own way. The Soviet Union froze a lot of ethnic conflicts and laid the seeds for other with massive population transfers which have left significant Russian minorities all over the shop, or other minorities displaced from their homeland and forming cuckoo’s in some other nest ticking away like time bombs.
Look what happened with the demise of Yugoslavia. They could not wait to get at each other’s throats, pick up where they left off. Hell, the Serbs still bitch endlessly about how the Croats sided with the Nazi’s and therefore it’s fine to kick the shit out of them.
Germany and France are right to block NATO membership until these problems are solved.
Yes.
I don’t want to wait for that to happen. Do you?
Erm, no… I’m just saying that it’s not that likely to happen either, that is, not as likely as some of the people in this thread are saying - which I meant to make clear by pointing to some actually existing new NATO members from the former sphere of influence of Russia which are obviously not, as tagos calls them, ‘(…)crappy little states, still boiling over with their petty barbarous feuds (…)’. I mean, notice the username? I know that the Czech Republic is none of those things - although I think some problems might yet come about with the large Russian population in the Baltics.
ETA: As to the ‘my query thing’ - I just that whether we allow countries into NATO or not is another question than the one being discussed, which it is, but not that it’s a question that I want answered. 
Red Fury, thank you. That was an excellent article, and made clear how badly the US has screwed the pooch here. That being said, I think Svejk’s point must be considered - the impetus for countries like Georgia to join NATO has come from both directions, and it has not just been that “crazy” Saakashvili who has been driving it.
Now, I think we can all agree that the South Ossetia business was idiotic. No one, but no one, has suggested that Georgia was right to do what it did; the most anyone has done was to suggest that maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. That was me, and I’ll freely admit that I was mistaken. They deserved to be tossed out of S. Ossetia and they were.
But that’s not where it stopped, and it seems pretty obvious that that wasn’t what this was really about, although mswas seems to want to keep bringing it back to that. Every analyst and ambassador I’ve seen on PBS, not exactly a bastion of the neo-cons or the right wing, has said that this is about Georgia’s relations with the west and about regime change in Georgia. They have also said that Russia’s response has been far disproportionate to what Georgia did in S. Ossetia. Almost every article you folks have shown me has said the same. And in fact, rather than trying to reinstate the Cold War, Bush has spent his entire administration cuddling up to Putin and saying what a great guy he was and how he was his new BFF. That hasn’t stopped him from also cozying up from Georgia, but it’s hardly been attempting to scare the US about the great Russian Bear. They’ve been too busy trying to terrify us about the Evil Islamo-Fascists[sup]TM[/sup]. So I think that if I’m paranoid about Russia, I’m doing that one on my own, without the help of the neo-cons this time (not outside the realm of possibility, mind you).
Now I understand that you think it’s ridiculous to allow ‘should’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to enter into this kind of discussion, but I grew up in the sixties, and I just can’t shake the old habits. So I’m having real trouble with the idea of just ending all of this by slapping Georgia’s nose and saying “Bad Georgia! BAD!!!” and then turning to Russia and saying “All right then, carry on.” I actually believe that if the people of Georgia or any of the other former Russian Republics want trade alliances with the west, they ought to be able to make them without having Russia bomb their country, irrespective of what we did in Serbia in the nineties. I understand that thanks to the policies of Bush, we don’t have any military options. I don’t know that they’d be appropriate if we had them available anyway (never a CIA or a State Dept. around when you need it!). But I think there’s a middle ground here. I can’t believe that the only thing that would register with Russia would be our beating the crap out of them. Perhaps the wise middle ground would be NOT to allow Georgia into NATO, but rather something else. Again, I don’t have access to the resources that will tell me that. I don’t understand Russian thinking well enough to judge.
But, mswas, there’s no need to insult me by suggesting that I take W’s position on anything! That’s hitting below the belt! 
Yet another quote, this time coming from Putin’s stance, from one of my prior links:
– bolding mine. Yep. Bit alarming I’d say.
Might I get back to you on this once I put it through BabelFish?. 
