[T]he US and EU have been effectively checkmated. Because, despite Saakashvili’s bellicose rhetoric about dire consequences if Putin does not retreat from his “large-scale military aggression” in Georgia, he knows that neither he nor his Western allies dares lift a finger to back up their words with action. And this fact is only reinforced by the U.S. implying that it would protect Georgia from Russia today in a manner that is eerily similar to the way the British promised to protect Poland just before Germany invaded in 1939.
[Tensions simmering between Mother Russia and her former dependent territory, Georgia, The iPINIONS Journal, June 6, 2008]
Just as I predicted over two months ago, Western leaders have responded with nothing more than hollow words to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s cries for help in repelling the Russian invasion of his country.
And no one knew this would be the case more than Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. That is why he made this Clausewitzian move to invade and occupy almost half of Georgia while engaging Western leaders in a diversionary war of words.
It is a shame that some of our partners are not helping us but, essentially, are hindering us. The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing.
[Vladimir Putin]
Of course, after (bad cop) Putin had effectively annexed half of Georgia (i.e., mission accomplished), he had no problem dispatching his puppet president, (good cop) Dmitry Medvedev (pictured here with his puppet master), to declare an end to hostilities.
Perhaps you saw Medvedev all over TV yesterday parroting the party-line pretext for this war (protecting ethnic Russians from ethnic cleansing by Georgians) and offering to resume Russia’s role as “peacekeepers” in this former Georgian territory:
The security of our peacekeepers and civilians has been restored…. The aggressor has been punished and suffered very significant losses. Its military has been disorganized.
At any rate, Putin’s message to Georgia and other former Republics of the former Soviet Union (like Ukraine) is crystal clear, namely: If you think you’re so far beyond Russia’s Cold-War sphere of influence that you can rub your political and military alliances with the West in our face, think again!
Yet I fully understand why Saakashvili thought he could challenge Russia with impunity (by using force to reclaim the Russian-controlled region of South Ossetia).
After all, not so long ago, President George W. Bush, the purported “leader of the free world” and commander-in-chief of the world’s sole superpower, traveled to Georgia and Ukraine and promised that “America will stand with you”; i.e., against Russian attempts to undermine their newly independent, US-inspired democracies.
But, given the self-evident hollowness of Bush’s promise, I am stupefied that Saakashvili is now taking foolish comfort in US presidential candidate John McCain’s declaration of solidarity, which he expressed with rhetorical bravado as follows:
I speak for every American when I say … Today we are all Georgians.
After all, the only reason Georgians should be comforted by this declaration is if the US military showed a clear intent to defend them against Russian aggression as if they were defending fellow Americans. And no American leader, not even McCain, would even harbor such intent.
Meanwhile, you’ve probably heard Bush and others talking about ceasefire negotiation to return Russia and Georgia to the “status quo ante”, which would require the Russians to cede control of the disputed regions they just took by force. But the only people who believe Putin will ever cede such control are those who believed that Bush would fight Putin to defend Georgians.
Accordingly, I predict that it’s only a matter of time before these two (de facto independent) provinces [namely South Ossetia and Abkhazia] formally reunite with their Mother Russia.
[Tensions simmering between Mother Russia and her former dependent territory, Georgia, The iPINIONS Journal, June 6, 2008]
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Tensions simmering between Mother Russia and…Georgia
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