THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING?
All the South Ossetians want is self-determination, but neither side really
gives a damn about them. From the standpoint of Georgia's sovereignty, the
breakaway areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are legitimate Georgian
territory, but by the same token their fight for self-determination is the
history of Georgia.
It was a Georgian who first made Georgia a part of the United Soviet
Socialist Republic, and it was a Georgian who later broke away from it, but
in that break away Georgia immediately had internal problems with South
Ossetia and Abkhazia. Suffice it to say, this is all about Russians in the
historical sense. Stalin was the Georgian (born in Gori) who created the
Georgia SSR as one of the 15 Soviet Socialist Republics.
Georgia was part of Imperial Russia until the 1917 revolution whereupon it
declared itself an independent nation. That didn't last long because it was
Stalin, with the consent of Lenin, who marched into Georgia in 1920 and
after heavy fighting declared Georgia back in the fold of what was once
Russia's empire, and declared it a Soviet Socialist Republic.
Georgians weren't happy campers, they didn't like the Bolsheviks, but Russia
brutally suppressed dissent. So it wasn't until the breakup of the Soviet
Union in 1989 that Georgia finally got it's complete independence from
Russia. However -- wouldn't you know it! -- not all of Georgia agreed with
the split from the "motherland," hence South Ossetia became part of
Georgia's internal problems and ultimately a civil war. They wanted
self-determination too, only not as part of Georgia. To make a long story
short, that conflict is still going on. At about the same time, Abkhazia
also wanted self-determination and didn't want to be part of Georgia, and
that conflict is also still going on.
In an attempt to simplify all this, let's just say Georgia wanted
self-determination from Russia, but wasn't ready to accept
self-determination by any regions within Georgia, like SOUTH Ossetia and
Abkhazia. Russia has been playing peacekeeper between all the factions, at
the request of the UN at one time, and CIS at another time. Needless to say,
CIS (Commonwealth of International States) is Russian dominated, (Just as
NATO is dominated by the U.S.) But the point here is the Russians are
"sanctioned" peacekeepers, albeit prejudiced ones. (See Georgia Map 1)
What is this conflict is really about?
The present conflict is not about all this self-determination stuff. It's
about the strategic interests of the west, meaning NATO and the U.S., as
opposed to the strategic interests of the Russians. Why does any nation have
a "strategic interest" in a region? It's always about geography, but not
just any geography. It has to be a geography that offers the military
strategic advantage of location and/or resources. The location here is
obvious, and so is the resource -- Caspian oil.
This is about the respective strategic Caspian oil interests of NATO and
Russia. That BTC oil pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) in Georgia IS OUR ONLY
CONTROL on the flow of Caspian oil. Russia controls every other pipeline of
Caspian oil.
The BTC pipeline, operated by British Petroleum, is over a thousand miles
long and brings oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia and through Turkey to
the Mediterranean, conveniently near to the US airbase at Incirlik. It has
been a U.S. strategic interest since Clinton first backed it in 1998 and
Bush's energy secretary was there for it's opening in 2005.
Washington wants to deny China easy land access to either Russia, the Middle
East or to the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea. The U.S. oil pipeline
alliance with Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan is in opposition to the Russian
control of the flow of Caspian oil. Hence, the importance of Georgia which
sits smack in the middle of the pipeline. (See the map of the pipeline in
Georgia Map 2)
The
second phase of this monster pipeline is to get the gas from Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan, via under the Caspian to hookup with the BTC pipeline in Baku.
This is not something Russia favors. Stay tuned.
Brzezinski's involved, so is Kissinger, Snowcroft and James Baker III,
everybody's playing on the same team for this event, including Soros by the
way. Brzezinski sits on the board of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
(USACC). The chairman of USACC is the President of ExxonMobil Exploration.
Other Board members include Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and James
Baker III, who in 2003 personally went to Tbilisi to tell Shevardnadze that
Washington wanted him to step aside in favor of the US-trained Georgian
President Mikhail Shaakashvili, who is now in charge. Getting the picture
now?
To the east of the Caspian Sea, Washington in one degree or another today
controls Pakistan, Afghanistan, potentially Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan. These serve as a potential US-controlled barrier or buffer zone
between China and Russian, Caspian and Iranian energy sources. Sure the U.S.
can easily get long without Caspian oil if it had to, but the nation that
controls the flow of Caspian oil, has strategic military control of all of
Eurasia.
And that's what this conflict is about.
The American military has been training and equipping the Georgian army
since the spring of 2002 when our Green Berets dropped in to trained and
equip three battalions of Georgian soldiers, US military instructors were
due to leave recently, but then the US ambassador to Georgia said they had
decided to continue training the Georgian army in a full-time program U.S.
'security guarantee'
That said, let's deal with the facts on the ground.
Let's make believe this is about a people's right to self-determination.
Sometimes, we take the side of national sovereignty, as is in Georgia; other
times, we side with self-determination, as in Kosovo. Self-determination
trumped national sovereignty in Kosovo, over the objections of Russia, China
and numerous other countries. How do we determine South Ossetia isn't like
Kosovo?
Simple. We trumpet self-determination when it suits us, and the Russians
trumpet it when it suits them. Despite the fact that the CIS approved
(Commonwealth of Independent States) peacekeeping operations for Georgia,
South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Tadjikistan, these operations have been carried
out almost exclusively by Russian soldiers, but we've seen that before with
U.S. peacekeeping too. The problem is that Russia is accused of using the
international respectability of CIS peacekeeping as a cloak in pursuit of
national interests. We know a lot about that subject. (Iraq anyone?)
Russia has been involved in numerous cooperative peacekeeping operations
sometimes with the UN, sometimes with NATO. So the Russians as a
peacekeeping force is not new. Russian peacekeepers were part of the UN
mission in Western Sahara, in NATO missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in UN
mission in Cambodia, Anglola, Rwanda, and Mozambique.
So the point is that Russian peacekeepers have been in S. Ossetia and
Abkhazia since Hector was a pup. Since Georgia broke away from the Soviets
and civil war broke out in Georgia. That's why they're there. So if
Shaakashvili orders his Georgian troops to attack SOUTH Ossetia, what the
hell did he think the Russian peacekeepers were going to do? What did he
think they were there for? Now this guy is a smart New York lawyer and
there's no way anybody is going to convince me that he didn't think the
Russians would slap him down. Nor did he think the U.S. would back him up
because Condi Rice told him in no uncertain terms to lay off the South
Ossetians because we couldn't back him up.
So the question we may never get an answer to is, what the hell was
Shaakashvili thinking? Someday, when nobody cares anymore, we may find out.
—Jack Slack
August, 2008