Georgian Crisis: Ten Reasons Why Russia is to Blame

Okay, this is it. Resisting pressure for a recap of the Georgian crisis, this article written by Christopher Westley, an adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute signals that a review is actually long overdue.

Apart from the blatant postmodern moral equivalencing (Russia is the USA; Georgia is Texas; What's next? Bush is Hitler?) that one hardly expects from a self-respecting economic institute as the Von Mises, the time horizon in which these events are supposed to have taken place - as was the case with Kosovo and Bosnia - does not exceed the period when the crisis was shot into the public consciousness by the media. Conflicts have histories and run-ups which usually play out well before the first shot is fired. The relativist brainpower however is strictly limited to the here and now and cannot be bothered with historical perspectives or absolute realities.

Russia (and the anti-militarist Westley) claim Georgia provoked Russia - the self-imposed 'peace enforcer in the conflict - when 'the regime' dastardly attacked the South Ossetian town of Tskinvali with heavy artillery on the opening morning of the Beijing Olympics (08/08/08). In the consciousness of the Westleys this is the arbitrary starting point of the crisis. But military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent, Moscow-based defense analyst gives another sequence of events in "The Russian-Georgian War was preplanned in Moscow":

"Late in the evening of August 7, a heavy mortar bombardment of Georgian villages near the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali provoked Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to order a major assault. The night attack by Georgian troops outfitted with Western-made night-vision equipment flushed the Ossetian fighters out and Tskhinvali was overrun in the morning. To stop the Georgian offensive thousands of Russian troops with hundreds of pieces of armor invaded through the Roki tunnel and rushed forward. Russian jets began bombing Georgian military installations and cities (see EDM, August 7)."

The Russian propaganda that Moscow had to take humanitarian action went unquestioned (because this allows an anti-American stance and saves one making a moral choice) and was repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream media (because our pragmatist position is so ethical that it justifies unethical behavior). It is by now just as irrevocably entrenched as 'the illegal Bush war' and the 'occupations'. There simply is no act of treason the deluded will not stoop to, in order to preserve their psycho-pathological projection.

As usual the train of logic to reach such an outcome requires a few maneuvers in irrationality. Who knows what goes on underneath the skull, but it may well be they believe that some KGB remnant in the Kremlin holds the secret to a Cold War period black-op, that enables them to levitate military hardware, as well as large troops contingents into the region practically overnight, by a sheer act of the will (thought creates reality). One just wonders what to make of the rapid deployment of the Black Sea naval task force, and the fact that large contingents of troops were also poured into Abkhazia.

This blog coincidentally stumbled upon a one year old item ("The New Russia: Georgia Alleges Second Attack in Four Months,"containing links to BBC and NYTimes articles) which has long passed out of the public consciousness, from which it transpires that Russia has been hurling missiles into Georgia since August 2007! So much for the hotheaded impulsiveness of the 'client' President Saakashvili (another poodle from the Bu$Hitler kennels)!

Of course this might be dismissed as a perverted form of double bluff, but the event that the US had to airlift some 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq after the fact, and not before, is a strong indication there was no premeditated intention of poking the bear on the part of the Georgian Government, that was at the time for the most part, enjoying their holidays.

And then, there's the comment by aforementioned independent defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. He says the aim, from the start, was to overthrow the Georgian Government and the that trap was laid long ago, actually in April when NATO declined to offer Georgia and Ukraine a Membership Action Plan. Read all of Felgenhauer's "The Russian-Georgian War was preplanned in Moscow."

After the fact you've also got to relativize away the Human Rights Watch report, and before it the cyber-attacks, which turned out to be private initiatives. And intimidating and targeting the press is of course totally off topic. Also the wider economic and geopolitical pointers must be ignored, unless you can build a conspiracy theory which implicates 'the joint American and Israeli 'military industrial complex'; having done all that successfully, the fact that the playbook is the mirror carbon copy of the Kosovo precedent, must also be ducked.

If we turn to Brian Whitmore of Liberty Radio we read: " Less than one month before Russia's armed forces entered Georgia on August 8 and held massive military training exercises in the North Caucasus involving 8,000 servicemen and 700 pieces of military hardware. At center stage in those maneuvers -- which took place in the second half of July, not far from Georgia's border -- was Russia's 58th Army, the very unit that would later play a key role in the incursion. Those exercises were just one link in a chain of incidents suggesting that Russia's military action in Georgia was planned months in advance, awaiting only an appropriate pretext to act."

We've been caught napping and the West "dismissed the Russian warnings and preparations as bluff until it was too late. US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza stated in Tbilisi, "Now we know" the true mission of the Railroad troops in Abkhazia (Interfax, August 11)," writes Felgenhauer.

That's water under the bridge, but we can stop repeating the propaganda canard that the Russians were 'provoked' and that their hand was forced by humanitarian considerations (the alleged genocide: goes to intent - in the light of the above, wish them a good time of it). Were they also provoked or moved by humanitarian sensitivities during the last century, when they forcibly incorporated the 'near abroad' into the USSR and force-fed them on vicious Marxist ideology?

The West made a grave mistake in seeking Kosovo's unilateral proclamation of independence towards a Greater Albania, but two wrongs wouldn't have made a right.

- Drawings by Victor Vashi from the book Red Primer for Children and Diplomats - Hat Tip: The People's Cube -

More on the Georgian Crisis, in chronological order:

- The Heat is on in the Caucasus (update)
- Caught Sleeping in Tbilisi
- Georgia Live Updates
- The Intricacies of Postmodern Diplomacy
- Georgian Crisis: Target the Messenger
- The War on Reality: the Return of the Evil Empire
- Georgian Crisis: since August 2007
- Georgian Crisis: The Islam Connection
- Georgian Crisis: "Russia is Blowing Up Europe"
- The LooneyGlobs and Cold War Ghosts
- Putinism Explained: the Power Tool

Related:

- "Freedom isn't Free"
- "Rumbling Russia"
- "Communist Crimes on Trial"

Update - Michael Totten in Georgia: "The Truth About Russia in Georgia"

- Filed on Articles in "Caucasian Heat" -