Mama Russian Bear

"A Culture Of Surveillance" by Chuck Baldwin

2009-04-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/chuckwagon.php

It is truly amazing how much news the American news media chooses to ignore. If one wants to discover what is actually going on in the world, he or she often has to go to the foreign press. This has again been the case with a story that every American should be extremely interested in, but which has been totally ignored by the American news media. I found this story in Russia Today.

According to RussiaToday.com, "The personal computer may soon be not-so-private, with the U.S. and some European nations working on laws allowing them access to search the content held on a person's hard drive.

"President Obama's administration is keeping unusually tight-lipped on the details, which is raising concerns among computer users and liberty activists."
The report also states, "In extreme secrecy from the public, the United States is hammering out an international copyright treaty with several other countries and the European Union. Under the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (or ACTA), governments will get sweeping new powers to search and seize material thought to be in breach of copyright. But why all the secrecy?"

Russia Today quotes Richard Stallman, prominent American software freedom activist, as saying, "Democracy gets bypassed and they can do to us whatever they want. I can only guess that it's going to be nasty, because if it weren't going to be nasty, they wouldn't need to keep it a secret."

The report also said, "Up until now, the breach of copyright has been a civil matter. The Obama administration seems to now want to criminalize it."
The report continued saying, "Some say modern America is being overtaken by a culture of surveillance."

A culture of surveillance indeed. What began in earnest under former President George W. Bush is now sharply escalating under President Barack Obama.
According to Ecommerce Journal, President Obama and his Big Brother fellow travelers in Congress are seeking power to "cut the whole world off the Internet." The report says, "Senators John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe proposed the Cybersecurity Act that would create the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor. Its powers are detailed in the The Cybersecurity Act of 2009.

"If the President so chooses, he can call a 'cybersecurity emergency' and shut down or limit any 'net traffic or a 'critical' network 'in the name of national security,' though the bill fails to provide concrete definitions on what is 'critical' or what constitutes an 'emergency.'"

The report goes on to say, "This new legislation seeks to give even more power to the government to regulate the Internet and, in future, the possibility to regulate content and usage. What begins as a method of defeating terrorism and protecting telecommunications, can quickly become a method to regulate 'hate speech' to assign 'motive' or 'intent' to harm and even to regulate and legislate the flow of information that is deemed by the 'thought police' to be inflammatory or counter-productive to their cause."

The report says that the new cybersecurity legislation can be a "framework for future, more invasive legislation. It is a first step to the loss of internet privacy, free speech and the free flow of information."

So, once again, the passing of a Republican Presidential administration and the advent of a Democratic Presidential administration have resulted in zero change in the overall direction of the ship of state. In the name of "national security," the federal government of this country continues to deepen its commitment to what can only be described as a police-state mentality. And, once again, the national news media in America chooses to ignore the story, and by so doing, shows willful compliance with this disturbing phenomenon.

I wonder how many Obama supporters are paying attention?

During the Bush years, my "conservative" brethren (especially the ones calling themselves Christians) repeatedly turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the myriad foibles and falsehoods, and frequent fraudulence of President Bush because he was a Republican. Now we will see how many Obama supporters will look the other way in order to protect President Obama because he is a Democrat. I suspect most of them will show themselves of no better character than the Bush supporters.

Consider: Obama promised to end the war in Iraq. But what has he done since being elected? He merely moved the major combat theater to Afghanistan. He is even in the process of escalating the war in Afghanistan to possibly include Pakistan. So, where are the "peacenik" liberals who supported Obama? Why do they not loudly proclaim their opposition, as they did when Bush was in office?

Furthermore, Obama criticized Bush's undisciplined deficit spending, but what has he done since becoming President? He has deeply expanded Bush's failed financial policy of excessive deficit spending. Again, where are all the loud voices of protest?
George Bush wanted amnesty for illegal aliens. Barack Obama wants amnesty for illegal aliens. George Bush supported the assault weapons ban. Barack Obama supports the assault weapons ban. George Bush wanted to limit the legal rights of certain people charged with crimes. Well, friends, Barack Obama also wants to limit the rights of people charged with crimes.

Just last week, an Associated Press report stated, "The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overrule long-standing law that stops police from initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer is present, another stark example of the White House seeking to limit rather than expand rights.
"The administration's action--and several others--have disappointed civil rights and civil liberties groups that expected President Barack Obama to reverse the policies of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, after the Democrat's call for change during the 2008 campaign."

So, where are Obama's supporters who thought they were voting for change? Will they do nothing, as did Bush's supporters, and accept this abridgment of personal liberty, simply because "their man" is in the White House? Probably.

In addition, George Bush created a Big-Government monster known as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Can there be any doubt that DHS is in the process of manufacturing a ubiquitous surveillance society that eavesdrops, snoops, and monitors virtually our entire lives? And what does Barack Obama do immediately after assuming office? He multiplies and expands the surveillance society to even greater degrees. So again I ask, where are all the Bush critics to denounce Barack Obama's draconian anti-privacy, anti-freedom policies?

The Internet is the last best source of free and independent information left. Think where the liberty movement would be without the Internet. But even as we speak, President Obama and his allies in Congress are attempting to obtain the authority to censor information on--and curtail access to--the Internet. Plus, in the name of "cybersecurity," they are plotting to obtain the authority to monitor and seize anyone's personal computer at will.

The Russia Today report is right: we do have a culture of surveillance. We also have a culture of cowardice by people from both sides of the political aisle who, in the name of partisan politics, are willfully accommodating and facilitating the demise of this constitutional republic.

April 24 - Day of Remembrance of Armenian Genocide

2009-04-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Armenian Genocide (presentation) from Vartan Simonian on Vimeo.

Stratfor: Red Alert: A Possible Revolution Simmering in Georgia

2009-04-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

www.stratfor.com

April 8, 2009 | 1943 GMT

VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images
Georgian opposition politicians making a statement in Tbilisi on March 27

Summary
Georgian opposition movements have planned mass protests for April 9, mostly in Tbilisi but also around the country. These protests could spell trouble for President Mikhail Saakashvili. The Western-leaning president has faced protests before, but this time the opposition is more consolidated than in the past. Furthermore, some members of the government are expected to join in the protests, and Russia has stepped up its efforts to oust Saakashvili.

Analysis
Opposition parties inside Georgia are planning mass protests for April 9, mainly in the capital city of Tbilisi but also across the country. The protests are against President Mikhail Saakashvili and are expected to demand his resignation. This is not the first set of rallies against Saakashvili, who has had a rocky presidency since taking power in the pro-Western “Rose Revolution” of 2003. Anti-government protests have been held constantly over the past six years. But the upcoming rally is different: This is the first time all 17 opposition parties have consolidated enough to organize a mass movement in the country. Furthermore, many members of the government are joining the cause, and foreign powers — namely Russia — are known to be encouraging plans to oust Saakashvili.

The planned protests in Georgia have been scheduled to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Soviet crackdown on independence demonstrators in Tbilisi. The opposition movement claims that more than 100,000 people will take to the streets — an ambitious number, as the protests of the past six years have not drawn more than 15,000 people. But this time around, the Georgian people’s discontent is greatly intensified because of the blame placed on Saakashvili after the Russo-Georgian war in August 2008. Most Georgians believe Saakashvili pushed the country into a war, knowing the repercussions, and into a serious financial crisis in which unemployment has reached nearly 9 percent.

Georgia’s opposition has always been fractured and so has only managed to pull together sporadic rallies rather than a real movement. But the growing discontent in Georgia is allowing the opposition groups to finally overcome their differences and agree that Saakashvili should be removed. Even Saakashvili loyalists like former Parliament Speaker Nino Burjanadze and former Georgian Ambassador to the United Nations Irakli Alasania have joined the opposition’s cause, targeting Saakashvili personally. The problem now is that opposition members still do not agree on how to remove the president; some are calling for referendums on new elections, and some want to install a replacement government to make sure Saakashvili does not have a chance to return to power. But all 17 parties agreed to start with large-scale demonstrations in the streets and go from there.

If the movement does inspire such a large turnout, it would be equivalent to the number of protesters that hit the streets at the height of the Rose Revolution, which toppled the previous government and brought Saakashvili into power in the first place.

Saakashvili and the remainder of his supporters are prepared, however, with the military on standby outside of Tbilisi in order to counter a large movement. During a demonstration in 2007, Saakashvili deployed the military and successfully — though violently — crushed the protests. But that demonstration consisted of 15,000 protesters; it is unclear if Saakashvili and the military could withstand numbers seven times that.

There is also concern that protests are planned in the Georgian secessionist region of Adjara, which rose up against and rejected Saakashvili’s government in 2004 after the Rose Revolution. This region was suppressed by Saakashvili once and has held a grudge ever since, looking for the perfect time to rise up again. Tbilisi especially wants to keep Adjara under its control because it is home to the large port of Batumi, and many of Georgia’s transport routes to Turkey run through it. If Adjara rises up, there are rumors in the region that its neighboring secessionist region, Samtskhe-Javakheti, will join in to help destabilize Saakashvili and the government. Georgia already officially lost its two northern secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Russian occupation during the August 2008 war and is highly concerned with its southern regions trying to break away.

These southern regions, like the northern ones, have strong support from Russia; thus, Moscow is square in the middle of tomorrow’s activities. Russia has long backed all of Georgia’s secessionist regions, but has had difficulty penetrating the Georgian opposition groups in order to organize them against Saakashvili. Though none of the 17 opposition groups are pro-Russian, STRATFOR sources in Georgia say Russian money has been flowing into the groups in order to nudge them along in organizing the impending protests.

Russia has a vested interest in breaking the Georgian government. Russia and the West have been locked in a struggle over the small Caucasus state. That struggle led to the August 2008 Russo-Georgian war, after which Moscow felt secure in its control over Georgia. Since Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama met April 1 and disagreed over a slew of issues, including U.S. ballistic missile defense installations in Poland and NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia is not as secure and is seeking to consolidate its power in Georgia. This means first breaking the still vehemently pro-Western Saakashvili. This does not mean Russia thinks it can get a pro-Russian leader in power in Georgia; it just wants one who is not so outspoken against Moscow and so determined to invite Western influence.

The April 9 protests are the point at which all sides will try to gain — and maintain — momentum. The 2003 Rose Revolution took months to build up to, but the upcoming protests are the starting point for both the opposition and Russia — and opposition movements in Georgia have not seen this much support and organization since the 2003 revolution. April 9 will reveal whether or not things are about to get shaken up, if not completely transformed, in Georgia.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T13:55:00.001-08:00

Georgia's Former Ambassador to Russia Says Georgia Started the War

2008-11-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

November 26, 2008, 4:29
Georgia started war in South Ossetia – Georgian diplomat

Georgia's former ambassador to Russia Erosi Kitsmarishvili has accused his own country of starting the war in South Ossetia. His comments almost led to a fistfight between politicians.

"It was the Georgian government that launched the military action. It doesn’t matter whether it was provoked or not," he told the Georgian parliamentary commission analysing the August events. "As for the fact that Russia was prepared for it, Moscow was ready to perform the actions it did, because they were part of Russia’s overall plan. I am not saying Georgia is to blame for everything, because Russia was not an innocent lamb either."

Erosi Kitsmarishvili was one of the founders of the ‘Rose Revolution’ and the former head of Georgia's Rustavi-2 TV station. This, however, didn't prevent the anger of one member of the commission on hearing his statement. He threw a pen at the former ambassador and seemed ready to fight.

"Today's session is a vivid example of how the Saakashvili regime is collapsing," commented Pikriya Chikhradze, a leader of the Georgian opposition party, New Rightists. "The behaviour of the commission members who assaulted Erosi Kitsmarishvili, shows that they are interested not in listening to a person who possesses really important information, but in publicly denying it."

Kitsmarishvili had more revelations about his conversations with President Saakashvili.

"The President told me he wanted to relocate the Georgian capital to Sukhum in Abkhazia in August," he said. "I told him there wasn't any peaceful way to reach this goal in four months and asked how we could develop relations with such plans in mind?"

Kitsmarishvili's controversial comments are seen by some as evidence of a growing battle in Georgian politics.

"A tough political fight is developing in Georgia between Saakashvili's team and the opposition. And the Georgian opposition consists of former allies of the incumbent president," said Vladimir Zharikhin, Deputy Head of the Institute of CIS countries. "The West knew that Saakashvili started the war. Yet there was an attempt to tell this story differently. But such distortion of the picture is possible only for a short term."

South Ossetia and Abkhazia were part of Georgia during the Soviet era. After the breakup of the USSR, the two republics pushed for independence resulting in an armed conflict with Tbilisi.

After several years of fighting a Russia- UN peacekeeping force was deployed in the two conflict zones. The growing tensions erupted into a war between Georgia and South Ossetia in August 2008.

The mainly Russian peacekeeping mission in the region deployed troops to push Georgian forces out of South Ossetia.

The republic's authorities claim Georgia’s actions caused the death of more than one and a half thousand civilians.

Despite criticism from the West, on August 26 Russia recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Georgian parliamentary commission investigating the conflict in South Ossetia is expected to announce its conclusion on what happened and who is to blame in mid- December.

Some findings are already known and according to the head of the commission, a criminal case could be opened against Georgia's former ambassador to Russia for alleged negligence during his work.

Source: RussiaToday

Pat Buchanan on Medvedev and Obama

2008-11-25T18:31:00.000-08:00

PJB: Meeting Medvedev Halfway
By Patrick J. Buchanan
November 25, 2008

"The morning after Barack Obama’s election, the congratulatory message from Moscow was in the chilliest tradition of the Cold War.

“I hope for constructive dialogue with you,” said Russia’s president, “based on trust and considering each other’s interests.”

Dmitry Medvedev went on that day, in his first State of the Union, to charge America with fomenting the Russia-Georgia war and said he has been “forced” to put Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad to counter the U.S. missile shield President Bush pledged to Poland.

Medvedev had painted Obama into a corner. No new American president can be seen as backing down from a Russian challenge.

Three days later, Polish President Lech Kaczynski tried to box Barack in. His office declared that, during a phone conversation with Kaczynski, Obama had promised to deploy the anti-missile missiles.

Obama foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough denied it.

One week later, however, Medvedev wisely walked the cat back.

During the G-20 summit in Washington, he told the Council on Foreign Relations the issue of Russian missiles in Kaliningrad “is not closed. I am personally ready to discuss it, and I hope that the new president and the new administration will have the will to discuss it.”

President-elect Obama should not let this opportunity slip by, for a second signal came last week that Russia does not want the Cold War II that the departing neocons wish to leave on his plate.

Moscow offered Spain and Germany use of Russian territory to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan. As our supply line from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the Khyber Pass to Kabul grows perilous, this has to be seen as a gesture of friendship by a Russia that shares, as a fellow victim of Islamic terror, the U.S. detestation of al-Qaida.

Opportunity also presents itself with the official report of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on the August war. According to The New York Times, the OSCE found, consistent with Moscow’s claims, that Georgia “attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.”

Russia’s response — running the Georgian Army out of South Ossetia, occupying Abkhazia and recognizing both as independent nations — may seem disproportionate and excessive. But, contrary to John (”We are all Georgians now!”) McCain, Moscow has a compelling case that Georgia’s Mikhail Saakashvili started the fire.

Medvedev is now on a four-nation Latin tour with stops in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. But this seems more like diplomatic tit-for-tat for high-profile U.S. visits to Tbilisi and other ex-Soviet republics than laying the groundwork for some anti-American alliance.

For, just as for Washington the relationship with Moscow is far more crucial than any tie to Tbilisi, so Moscow’s tie to Washington is surely far more crucial to Russia than any tie to Caracas or Havana.

With these opening moves, how might Obama test the water for a better relationship with the Russia of Medvedev and Vladimir Putin?

First, Obama should restate his campaign position that no anti-missile system will be deployed in Poland until fully tested.

Second, he should declare that, as this system is designed to defend against an Iranian ICBM with a nuclear warhead, it will not be deployed until Iran has tested an ICBM and an atomic device.

So long as the Iranian threat remains potential, not actual, there is no need to deploy a U.S. missile defense in Poland against it.

Third, he should invite Medvedev to Camp David to discuss what more they might do together to ensure that no such Iranian threat, to either nation, ever materializes. For if Iran does not test an ICBM or atomic device, what is the need for a missile defense in East Europe?

Fourth, invoking the principle of self-determination, Obama might propose a plebiscite in Georgia and Abkhazia to determine if these people wish to return to Tbilisi’s rule.

The second bone of contention between us is prospective NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine.

As NATO is a military alliance, at the heart of which is Article V, which obligates every ally to come to the defense of a member who is attacked, to bring Georgia in would be madness.

To cede to Saakashvili power to bring us into confrontation with Russia would be to rival British stupidity in giving Polish colonels power to drag the empire into war with Germany over Danzig, which is exactly what the Polish colonels proceeded to do in 1939.

Before the NATO summit next week, Obama should signal to NATO, and the Bush administration, that nothing irreversible should be done to put Ukraine or Georgia on a path to membership.

First, because the president-elect will decide himself about new war guarantees in Eastern Europe or the Caucasus. Second, because these are matters to be taken up at a Medvedev-Obama summit, not foreclosed for him by neocons now trooping home to their think tanks."

See the article on Pat's official blog site.

Georgians Protest Against Saakashvili

2008-11-15T23:33:00.000-08:00

The New York Times (Times Topics)

NOVEMBER 7, 2008, 4:38 PM

By PAUL A. GOBLE

"A year to the day since President Mikhail Saakashvili used force to disperse a demonstration in Tbilisi, an action for which he has now apologized, more than 10,000 Georgians staged a demonstration there to demand “an independent investigation” of the August war and “the peaceful change of government” in their country.

Organized by both five opposition parties and various groups not represented in the parliament, the demonstration marks the first step in a five-month action plan designed to culminate in the replacement of Saakashvili and the restoration of media and other freedoms in Georgia.

The immediate goal of the opposition is the “return of Imedi television back to its legal owner before Nov. 23 – the fifth anniversary of the Rose Revolution – and the opening up of the country’s electronic media to all parties, something that revolution was carried out in the first place to ensure.

Then, the opposition figures say, they will form “a united political organization” at an assembly to be held sometime between December 10 and 20. Some of them are looking forward to the creation of a single Democratic Party while others appear to be in favor of a looser confederation of groups.

(Among those pushing for a single party are Gia Tortladze and Georgy Tsagareishvili, two former activists of the United Opposition. They declared yesterday that they are even now working to establish a new political organization, the Democratic Party of Georgia, which they said would have a center-right orientation.)

That group whether tightly organized or not, the opposition figures now say, will organize demonstrations on Jan. 25 to demand that the results of the January 2008 presidential and the May 2008 parliamentary elections null and void because of what they say were massive violations by government officials of the country’s election laws.

And if after these actions, “the authorities do not take into consideration the demands of the Georgian people,” then, “on April 9, 2009, a national disobedience campaign and continuous round-the-clock protest rallies will be staged outside the parliament building [in Tbilisi] and in other cities and regions of the country.

That campaign, the opposition figures said today in a broadside, “will last until President Saakashvili and his government resign.”

During today’s demonstrations, opposition leaders explained why they feel compelled to launch what would be in fact a peaceful revolution but a revolution nonetheless. Levan Gachechiladze, who lost to Saakashvili in the presidential race, said that the Georgian president’s actions in August and at other times left the people no other choice.

“This country belongs to us,” he said, and we will not allow anyone to harm it. We must remember that in the regions of Georgia conditions are extremely bad. Together we will save Georgia” from the errors of its leadership during the war with Russia and from their increasingly repressive regime.

Meanwhile, other opposition figures created the Path of Ilya Union of Social-Political Organizations and Parties. Named in honor of Ilya Chavchavadze, that group has as its immediate goal the restoration of relations with and the normalization of ties to the Russian Federation.

Other opposition figures are discussing what they should do, with personal ambitions and hostilities often preventing them from coming together in any concerted effort for long. That has long been a Georgian problem where some people say “with two Georgians, you will have at least three political parties.”

And there are two other reasons why the opposition may not succeed: On the one hand, many Georgians and their friends as well are fearful about the consequences of yet another extra-constitutional resolution of Georgia’s problems. And on the other, Saakashvili himself appears to be listening to the opposition and at least in some ways meeting its demands.

Today, the Georgian government website posted a declaration by President Saakashvili and a list of steps he said his government has taken or will take to respond to the opposition. Most important, the Georgian leader said that it is “our duty” to remember what happened last Nov. 7 and not repeat “the mistakes made by the Georgian authorities.” Those events, he added, show “how important it is for the government and the president to listen to the people and to maintain dialogue even with minor groups.”

Saakashvili has made similar declarations in the past, and many Georgians will not be inclined to believe him this time around, especially as international coverage of the events leading up to the war, as in today’s New York Times, tilts away from the version of events he has insisted on.

But unless the opposition really can unite, Saakashvili is likely to be able to play one group off against the other, even as his authority declines and the temptation grows for him to use repressive rather than democratic measures to resolve the current crisis within Georgia and between Georgia and its northern neighbor."

Paul A. Goble writes regularly at Window on Eurasia.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

See the original story here.

Was Georgia a Neo-Con Conspiracy?

2008-11-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

From: Coffee House

Was Georgia a Neo-Con Conspiracy? A Lesson for Obama

By Tom Hayden - November 10, 2008, 12:33PM

"New revelations about Georgia's August war with Russia should send a warning to president-elect Barack Obama about how a commander-in-chief can be manipulated into war.

It now appears that the same neo-conservatives who manipulated the US into the Iraq war on false evidence were directly involved in backing Georgia's ill-fated operation on August 7-8, which eyewitness military observers have described as indiscriminate attacks by Georgia on Russian and civilian positions. The observers reports, first made in August and then October to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, were disclosed in the New York Times three days after the presidential election. [NYT, Nov. 7]

The new evidence increases the likelihood that the August 7-8 clash between Georgia and Russia was an "October Surprise" that would highlight John McCain's greater foreign policy experience at the height of the presidential election.

The Georgia fighting occurred immediately before the Democratic convention in Denver. McCain, the leading public advocate for Georgia, immediately declared "we are all Georgians now" and promised "to blast Russia." Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, at first called for greater diplomacy, but quickly fell in line with a bipartisan consensus of national security advisers and the mainstream media. Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, openly applauded the White House for its rapid response, including support for NATO's inclusion of Georgia and the Ukraine and a one billion dollar emergency appropriation.

The newly-released evidence for the "October Surprise" now deserves deeper reflection by Obama and his advisers, and greater investigation by the mainstream media.

The trail of evidence stats with Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser and former director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which secured some $90 million in federal funds to lobby for the fabricated agenda of Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi leading to the Iraq invasion.

Scheunemann became a registered foreign agent for Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgian government when it came to power in 2004, making $800,000 in fees for his lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, until the relationship on May 15 was formally terminated under McCain's 2008 campaign rules.

In those years, McCain traveled to Georgia more than once, nominated his "close friend" Saakashvili for a Nobel Prize in 2005, engineered support for Georgia through the Republican Democracy Institute, and supported the US training of combat forces there. With Schuenemann as his adviser, Saakashvili had campaigned on a platform of taking back South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Schuenemann was also his lobbyist when Saakashvili sent troops to retake two other separatist enclaves, Ajaria in 2004, and upper Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia in 2006, both over Russian objections. Schuenemann and McCain visited Georgia again in 2006.

Scheunemann invented the neo-conservative battle cry of "rolling back rogue states", used by McCain in a 1999 speech, an echo of the Cold War strategy of rolling back the Soviet Union, and was a paid lobbyist for Latvia, Macedonia, Romania, and the so-called Caspian Alliance, a consortium including British Petroleum, Chevron and Conoco building a pipeline through Georgia to bypass the former Soviet Union.

Scheunemann attacked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006 for "appeasement" of Russia over Georgia, suggesting the same tensions between the neo-conservatives, McCain, and Cheney's office versus the State Department that undermined rational assessments in the runup to Iraq. [Financial Times, Oct. 21, 2006]

Now that Georgia's August 7 operation appears to have been pre-planned and deliberate, is it possible to believe that Scheunemann was unaware of a scenario that closely matched the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident? Before this becomes yesterday's news, someone should ask what did he know and when did he know it? Did the US advisers to the Georgian military know and not report the facts? In the unlikely event that they were uninformed and uninvolved, the McCain team was quick to exploit the moment to attack Obama for inexperienced wobbling.

There followed a complete acquiescence by the Democrats, led by Obama's national security advisers, whose Cold War conditioning apparently trumped their own experience of being manipulated into the Iraq war. Or was a political decision made that Obama could not afford to appear weaker than McCain on Russia? A reignited Cold War would have been fused with the War on Terrorism in one dominant paradigm.

Now that they are in opposition, there is little doubt that the neo-conservatives will continue their strategy of confrontation on the Russian border. These are people who deliberately exaggerated the Soviet military threat in the Reagan years, developed the Project for the New American Century [where Scheunemann was a director], fabricated evidence about Saddam's arsenal, and seemingly have never stopped. They could destroy an Obama presidency by demanding expenditures for multiple wars which America cannot win and cannot afford, or alternatively accusing him of weakening America in the world.

The important cautionary lesson for Obama is that his initial instincts favoring diplomacy were correct while his national security advisers failed him. There is a parallel with the early days of the John Kennedy presidency, when the national security establishment presented a plan for invading Cuba to a young president eager to prove his national security mettle. If Kennedy rejected the Bay of Pigs invasion, he would have been accused of weakness and treason. When the invasion turned into a debacle - the Cubans had detailed information about the training and landing sites - Kennedy was quoted later as wishing he could tear the CIA into a thousand pieces. Indeed, if the national security advisers had prevailed against the secret diplomacy of the Kennedy brothers, there might have been nuclear war over Cuba. John Kennedy's deep questioning of the Cold War began with those disastrous experiences.

Vice president Joe Biden famously warned that Barack Obama would be tested over national security policy in the first months of his tenure. That the testing may come from within the national security establishment, not only from foreign sources, should give Obama pause as he contemplates the time ahead."

See the original story here.

BBC News: Georgia accused of targeting civilians

2008-10-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

By Tim Whewell
BBC File On 4

The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians.

Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes.

The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia's supporters in the West.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told the BBC the attack on South Ossetia was "reckless".

He said he had raised the issue of possible Georgian war crimes with the government in Tbilisi.

The evidence was gathered by the BBC on the first unrestricted visit to South Ossetia by a foreign news organisation since the conflict.

Georgia's attempt to re-conquer the territory triggered a Russian invasion and the most serious crisis in relations between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War.

And Georgians themselves have suffered. We confirmed the systematic destruction of former Georgian villages inside South Ossetia.

Some homes appear to have been not just burned by Ossetians, but also bulldozed by the territory's Russian-backed authorities.

The war began when Georgia launched artillery attacks on targets in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, at about 2330 on 7 August 2008.

Georgia said at the time that it was responding to increasing attacks on its own villages by South Ossetia militia, although it later said its action was provoked by an earlier Russian invasion.

Eye-witness account

Georgy Tadtayev, a 21-year-old dental student, was one of the Ossetian civilians killed during the fighting.

His mother, Taya Sitnik, 45, a college lecturer, told the BBC he bled to death in her arms on the morning of 9 August after a fragment from a Georgian tank shell hit him in the throat as they were both sheltering from artillery fire in the basement of her block of flats.

Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili refutes the allegations of war crimes

Mrs Sitnik said she subsequently saw the tank positioned a few metres from the building, firing shells into every floor.

Extensive damage to the five-storey block appeared consistent with her version of events.

She said she and her son were watching television when the Georgian attack began.

"They started firing not from rifles, but from heavy weapons. Shells were exploding."

"We jumped up straight away, switched off the lights and ran down to the cellar."

"And we sat here on boxes. We thought it would end, but the firing got heavier and heavier," she added.

"They went on firing all the next day without stopping. At some point there was a pause, and we saw Georgian soldiers going along the street in their Nato uniforms," according to Mrs Sitnik.

"Then they started firing again, even more heavily. The Grad rockets were coming over all the time."

"How can you trust those people now? What possible friendship can there be? Let them all be cursed, cursed for the deaths of our children."

Neighbours said another resident of the block, Khazbi Gagloyev, also died of wounds received during the attacks.

'Basements targeted'

The Russian prosecutor's office is investigating more than 300 possible cases of civilians killed by the Georgian military.

Some of those may be Ossetian paramilitaries, but Human Rights Watch believes the figure of 300-400 civilians is a "useful starting point".

That would represent more than 1% of the population of Tskhinvali - the equivalent of 70,000 deaths in London.

Allison Gill, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said: "We're very concerned at the use of indiscriminate force by the Georgian military in Tskhinvali.

"Tskhinvali is a densely populated city and as such military action needs to be very careful that it doesn't endanger civilians."

"We know that in the early stages there were tank attacks and Grad rockets used by Georgian forces," she added.

"Grad rockets cannot be used in densely populated areas because they cannot be precisely targeted, and as such they are inherently indiscriminate.

"Our researchers were on the ground in Tskhinvali as early as 12 August.

"And we gained evidence and witness testimony of Grad rocket attacks and tank attacks on apartment buildings, including tank attacks that shot at the basement level.

"And basements are typically areas where civilians will hide for their own protection.

"So all of this points to the misuse, the inappropriate use of force by Georgia against civilian targets," according to Alison Gill.

Human Rights Watch will talk only of the "possible" deliberate targeting by Georgian forces of individual civilians, a still more serious charge, though some Ossetians the BBC spoke to in Tskhinvali claim to have witnessed such cases.

Wreckage

Marina Kochieva, a doctor at Tskhinvali's main hospital, says she herself was targeted by a Georgian tank as she and three relatives were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She says the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, forcing them to crash into a ditch.

The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground.

She showed the BBC the burnt-out wreckage of the car on the town's ring-road, riddled with bullet holes and with a much larger hole, apparently from a tank round, in the front passenger door.

Ms Kochieva says a nurse from her hospital was killed while fleeing Tskhinvali in similar circumstances.

She says she counted 18 burnt-out cars on the ring-road on 13 August, at the end of the war, suggesting there may have been more casualties.

Asked if, at night, Georgian soldiers might not have suspected her car of carrying Ossetian fighters, Ms Kochieva said: "Fighters wouldn't have gone away from town, they would have gone towards town. We were escaping like other refugees.

"The Georgians knew this was the 'Road of Life' for Ossetians. They were sitting here waiting to kill us," she said.

Georgia's Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili told the BBC, "I can firmly say that the Georgian military, on intention, never attacked directly any civilian object.

"On the surface, the damage to some of the houses in Tskhinvali that can be observed might lead to this conclusion. But to see if some is damage inflicted by direct targeting, for that an in-depth military assessment needs to be done.

"I think the best response is a fully-fledged independent, impartial international inquiry into the issue," she added.

Her British counterpart David Miliband, who visited Georgia immediately after the war to show solidarity with its government, said he took the allegations of war crimes "extremely seriously" and had raised them "at the highest level" in Tbilisi.

Apparently hardening his language towards Georgia, he called its actions "reckless".

But he added: "The Russian response was reckless and wrong".

"It's important that the Russian narrative cannot start with Georgian actions; it has to start with the attacks on the Georgians from the South Ossetians and that is the tit-for-tat that got out of control," he said.

Revenge

The BBC saw evidence of the cycle of revenge since the war, with the demolition of most houses in the former ethnic Georgian villages on the northern outskirts of Tskhinvali.

The houses, whose occupants fled during the war to other parts of Georgia, were burnt by Ossetians immediately after the fighting.

They are now expected to be replaced by a brand-new housing complex with a cinema and sports facilities to be financed by the city of Moscow.

Zaur Gagloyev, a 20-year-old former law student, now unemployed, claimed he was one of those responsible for the burning.

"There were so many provocations in these villages by Georgians," he said.

"For example, they were taking Ossetians as hostages and that's why I feel so angry."

Mr Gagloyev added: "If you want an advice on how to burn a house, just set light to a curtain and the whole house will catch fire."

Asked if he was guilty of ethnic cleansing, he replied, "No, it wasn't ethnic cleansing.

"No-one was killed there. We just let them go from our land. I don't know whether they will return or not," he added.

"But I did everything I could for them not to return. Never. You can call it ethnic cleaning, but I think I just did it to prevent a future war," he said.

Full Story from BBC NEWS

Mama Bear's Blog Comment Policy

2008-10-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

My policy was expressed so well by the ol' Rodney King and, many years before that, by a Russian cartoon character Cat Leopold, in practically the same words: "Let's get along!" In the last couple of days I received a couple of comments with the "F" word. As a lady, even though a bear, I cannot allow even non-gentlemen swear in my presence, so comments with curse words are rejected.

I love Russia, but I also love the United States. It pains me that today we in the US are behaving so stupidly towards Russia. I believe that both the US and Russia would greatly benefit from a partnership. We should not be pushing Russia into the "warm" embrace of Hugo Chavez and other nutjob characters. I believe that Saakashvili is not a friend of the US and not a democratic leader whatsoever. You may disagree with me, but let's agree to disagree.

Today's Quote from Pat

2008-10-14T16:42:00.000-07:00

Pat Buchanan says on his blog:

"America needs a bottom-up review of all strategic commitments dating to a Cold War now over for 20 years.

Is it essential to keep 30,000 troops in a South Korea with twice the population and 40 times the wealth of the North? Why are McCain and Obama offering NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees against Russia, to a Georgia run by a hothead like Mikheil Saakashvili, and a Ukraine, millions of whose people prefer their kinship to Russia to an alliance with us?"

See full text here.

Dmitry Medvedev: Speech at World Policy Conference

2008-10-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

October 8, 2008
Evian, France

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Ladies and gentlemen,

I appreciate this invitation to address the first World Policy Conference and I would like to start by commending the foresight of France. Distinguished Tierry de Montbrial, when contemplating almost a year ago this truly vital conference, must have known that it would coincide with the most acute phase of the world financial crisis in these October days.

For two days already now the discussions here, in La Grange au Lac, have examined the dangerous challenges facing the modern world. The goal is to work out common responses to these challenges. Even this hall with its Russian birch trees and Savoy decoration reminds us of the interdependence and unity of the world, and of the harmony and compatibility of various traditions and cultures on our common European continent.

Now, let me share with you my views on recent developments in the world and on ways to resolve the existing problems. I would like to address three issues: ways to overcome the current economic crisis; the situation in the Caucasus; and I would like to say a few words on convening a new conference on security.

The issues under discussion show that the world has reached a critically important, transition stage of its development. Recent events in the Caucasus have demonstrated that it is impossible to appease or contain an aggressor based on bloc approaches. If irresponsible, adventurous actions by the ruling regime of a small country (Georgia in this particular case) are capable of destabilizing the situation in the world, is this not proof that the international security system based on unipolarity no longer works?

It is also evident that economic egoism is also a consequence of the unipolar vision of the world and of the desire to be its megaregulator. It is a dead-end policy in terms of global economic development, and I will return to that later. But first I would like to comment on what led to the build-up of conflict potential in the security area.

I think that the origins of the current situation can be found in the events that took place seven years ago. It was then that the world missed its historic chance, the chance to de-ideologize international politics and create a genuinely democratic world order. It let slip this chance because of the United States’ desire to consolidate its global rule.

You will recall that in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 Russia and many other states did not hesitate to show our solidarity with the United States. We did this not only for the sake of combating terrorism (this was only natural), but also for the sake of overcoming the divisions the Cold War had created in the world.

However, after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States started a chapter of unilateral actions which not coordinated with the United Nations or even with a number of the United States’ partners. It is enough to mention the decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty and the invasion of Iraq.

The result was a trend of growing divisions in international relations. This was manifested in the unilateral proclamation of Kosovo’s independence and in the de facto revival of the policy of deterrence so popular in the twentieth century.

Military bases have been established along our borders. The third ABM deployment area is being created in the territory of the Czech Republic and Poland. Yes, the number of antiballistic missiles will be limited, but what are they for, why are they deployed? And, again, what prevented the United States from consulting first with its allies?

Of course, none of these countries in themselves are any threat to Russia. But when a decision is taken in this way, without consultations, including with its partners in NATO and the EU, that is to say, without consultations within Europe, we cannot but have the impression that tomorrow could bring yet further decisions to deploy yet more missile defence systems. With this kind of unipolar decision-making process, there are no guarantees against this happening, no guarantees for the Russian Federation, in any case.

The Warsaw Treaty Organization ceased to exist twenty years ago, but to our regret at least, NATO’s expansion continues full steam ahead. Today, NATO is actively discussing the admission of Georgia and Ukraine. What’s more, it sees the issue in battle terms: admitting these countries would be victory over Russia, while keeping them out would be tantamount to capitulation.

But the real issue is that NATO is bringing its military infrastructure right up to our borders and is drawing new dividing lines in Europe, this time along our western and southern frontiers. No matter what we are told, it is only natural that we should see this as action directed against us. But the moment we try to point out that this is objectively contrary to Russia’s national security interests everyone starts getting nervous. How else are we to interpret this behaviour?

I would like to make the logic of our behavior as clear as possible. We are in no way interested in confrontation. Russia's successful development depends on transparent and equal international relations. They are also the best guarantee of stability in the world.

I would like to emphasize that we are open to cooperation. And we intend to cooperate responsibly and pragmatically. The events of the last two months contain much tragedy but they are at the same time an example of pragmatic cooperation between Russia and the European Union. When Russia, Europe and the entire world found themselves confronted with crisis in the Caucasus, we managed to act in a proactive and coordinated manner with a sense of responsibility for our common European future. I particularly note in this respect French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s bold and responsible action.

I am convinced that people seek peace and harmony. They want to cooperate, do business and exchange cultural and educational achievements. They want to meet and communicate as friends and neighbours. And I have no doubt that these humanitarian factors will yet manifest themselves in a meaningful and robust way.

In this context, I think it is vital that we at the very least all calm down and abandon the rhetoric of confrontation, which, as we know, sooner or later takes on a life of its own.

We all know full well that we have already been through this kind of exchange of courtesies many times in the past. We thought everyone had learned its pointlessness by now. Most important, what does it give us as a real solution to the crisis? This is all has-beens. Sovietology is has-been, but sovietology, like paranoia, is a dangerous disease. And it is a pity that part of the U.S. Administration still suffers from it.

People should be studying the new Russia and not reviving Soviet phantoms.

But I am sure that a "new Fulton" and a new edition of the Cold War are not on the agenda, no matter how deep these notions remain stuck in the minds of some politicians.

The past two months have shown us clearly who is ready to help Russia in a crisis, who is our real friend and who is not. But we think nothing fatal or irreversible has happened. And let us be frank: the current situation represents an acute phase of the continuing crisis of the entire Euro-Atlantic policy brought about by the "unipolar syndrome". We need now to find a way out of this crisis. We have to find a way out together.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Taking into account what has been said, I will share with you my vision of the principles of self-organization in a just and multipolar world. There is no doubt that it should be based on collective foundations and the rule of international law.

Force divorced from law unavoidably breeds unpredictability and chaos when everyone starts fighting each other, as happened in Iraq. Any selective application of the basic provisions of international law undermines international legality. But legality cannot be "selective": either it does exist or it does not.

I think that all countries, large and small, must resolutely abandon war as an instrument of policy. If we recognize that international relations is an accommodation of interests of equal and sovereign states, any attempt to dominate and achieve one's own goals at the expense of others would have to be seen as amoral. It is also inadmissible to impose on other states one’s national laws or the decisions of one’s national courts.

In this respect, I want to emphasize the importance of maintaining the central and coordinating role of the United Nations as the most plenipotentiary international organization. It is more important now than ever to strengthen and uphold its international and legal authority.

Now a few words about the nature and first lessons of the economic crisis. It was brought about by the economic egoism of a number of countries. This is something I first spoke about in June at the International Economic Forum in Saint-Petersburg. As we see, today this crisis threatens to undermine the stability of the entire world’s development.

Our experts kept warning about the increasing negative trends on commodity and food markets and in the financial system. And we openly shared our assessments of these future threats at international forums, including at the recent G8 summit in Japan.

What should be done?

First, I believe that in these new conditions, we need to streamline and systematize both national and international regulatory institutions.

Second, we need to get rid of the serious imbalance between the amount of issued financial instruments and the real returns on investment programs. The race to compete fuels financial soap bubbles, while public companies’ accountability before their shareholders is diluted and even eroded away altogether.

Third, the risk management system must be strengthened. Each market actor needs to take their share of the risks and responsibility right from the outset. There should be no illusions about the ability of any asset to rise endlessly in value. The world just does not work this way. It is contrary to economic laws.

Fourthly, we need to ensure maximum information transparency and full disclosure for companies, tighten supervisory requirements and increase the responsibility of rating agencies and audit companies.

And finally, fifth, we need to ensure that everyone will reap the benefits of removing barriers to international trade and free movement of capital. Unfortunately, we have come now to understand this necessity only through a crisis that has brought down living standards and destabilized business.

All these problems are international. They call for the development and use of new critical technologies in politics and the economy. It is with the aim of resolving these problems that Russia has launched its call for change in the global financial architecture, a revision of the role played by today’s institutions and the creation of new international institutions, institutions that can ensure genuine stability.

Any crisis offers at the same time a chance to resolve systemic contradictions. We need to use this opportunity to clean out our systems and prolong and maximize the growth periods in our economies. The chance is still there for the taking, but we need to realize the multi-polar nature of the world and the complexities of globalization.

The unipolar economic model had already proved its ineffectiveness during the crises in the 1990s. The pillars of the system - the IMF and WTO– were left discredited. More recently, the weakening dollar has created a whole string of problems. Now we see the fragmentation of the world financial system underway literally before our very eyes.

The example of the USA, and others too, has shown that it is just one step from self-regulated capitalism to financial socialism. What’s more, we see them ready to nationalize one asset after another. Factors for stability in this situation would be the creation of new financial centers and strong regional currencies, as has already happened in Europe with the EU economy and a strong regional currency – the Euro.

Russia will actively encourage this recovery process in the international financial system, and not only in the G8. It is clear now that acting through the G8 alone is not enough, and I am pleased to see that many of our American colleagues are starting to say this too.

What I mean is that we need to get other key world economies engaged in this process too: China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and maybe others too. At any rate, Europe must not become the weak and vulnerable link here.

Globalization must be accompanied by an increased role of states as guarantors of successful national development. Collective global management structures, meanwhile, will act as arbiters ensuring the compatibility of the different economic strategies.

In this connection I think President Nicolas Sarkozy's idea to hold a multilateral meeting to consider the problems of the global financial system is a timely proposal. His proposal to create a common economic space between the European Union and Russia is also far-sighted. This would make it easier for us to ensure the stability of our economies and create a genuinely new climate for our relations.

I think we could also start discussing together the future of our common European continent. By this I mean Europe’s role in the global economy and the establishment of a just world order. Historically, Russia is part of European civilization and for us, as Europeans, it matters a lot what values will shape the future world.

Let me turn to the Caucasus crisis. I think that everything that can be said about its causes has already been said. We have made our decisions and their motivation–I hope – is clear for all. Meanwhile I would also like to inform you all that today the withdrawal of Russian troops from the security zones around South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be completed before midnight.

With the European Union observers now stationed in the security zones on the borders between South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Georgia, we hope they will carry out their mission to guarantee the non-use of force and prevent provocation by the Tbilisi regime. This is what we agreed with the European Union.

The explosion at our peacekeepers’ headquarters in Tskhinvali shows just how dangerous the situation is and just what provocations are possible. More Russian peacekeepers have been killed. This is another cruel crime and offenders will be punished.

We would like to hope that this tragic page in the history of Caucasus has been turned now. I want to stress once again the positive role of the European Union in proposing a peaceful solution to the Caucasus crisis. At a time when other forces in the world had no good will or ability to do this, we found in the EU an active, responsible and pragmatic partner. I think this is proof of the maturity of relations between Russia and EU.

Now we need to decide together how to live in the aftermath of the crisis, how to avoid new shocks and strengthen the foundations of international security as a whole.

Ladies and gentlemen,

There is no ignoring the fact that not multilateral diplomacy, nor regional mechanisms, nor the current European security architecture in general, succeeded in preventing the aggression that took place. The NATO-centric approach in particular has shown its weakness. We should draw conclusions from this situation.

The Euro-Atlantic vision today needs a positive agenda. Theevents in the Caucasus have only confirmed how absolutely right the concept of a new European security treaty is today. It would give us every possibility of building an integrated and solid system of comprehensive security.

This system should be equal for all states–without isolating anyone and without zones with different level of security. It should consolidate the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole on the basis of uniform rules of the game. And it should ensure in stable and legally binding form our common security guarantees for many years to come.

My partners often ask me what would be new in the Treaty. Here in Evian I would like to present for the first time some specific provisions as I see them.

First. The Treaty should clearly affirm the basic principles for security and intergovernmental relations in the Euro-Atlantic area. These principles include the commitment to fulfill in good faith obligations under international law; respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of states, and respect for all of the other principles set out in the truly fundamental document that is the United Nations Charter.

Second. The inadmissibility of the use of force or the threat of its use in international relations should be clearly affirmed. It is fundamental for the Treaty to guarantee uniform interpretation and implementation of those principles. The treaty could also cement a unified approach to the prevention and peaceful settlement of conflicts in the Euro-Atlantic space. The emphasis should be on negotiated settlements that take into account the different sides’ positions and strictly respect peacekeeping mechanisms. It would perhaps be useful to set out the dispute resolution procedures themselves.

Third. It should guarantee equal security, and I mean equal security and not any other kind of security. In this respect we should base ourselves on three ‘no’s. Namely, no ensuring one’s own security at the expense of others. No allowing acts (by military alliances or coalitions) that undermine the unity of the common security space. And finally, no development of military alliances that would threaten the security of other parties to the Treaty.

We need to concentrate on military and political issues because it is hard security that plays a determining role today. And it is here that we have seen a dangerous deficit of controlling mechanisms recently.

Fourth. It is important to confirm in the Treaty that no state or international organization can have exclusive rights to maintaining peace and stability in Europe. This applies fully to Russia as well.

Fifth. It would be good to establish basic arms control parameters and reasonable limits on military construction. Also needed are new cooperation procedures and mechanisms in areas such as WMD proliferation, terrorism and drug trafficking.

Our joint work on the Treaty should also assess how the structures established in the past meet modern requirements. I stress that we do not seek to abolish or even weaken anything that we have now. All we want is to achieve more harmonious work together on the basis of a common set of rules.

Life will show us the best platform for negotiations. And if we agree to go ahead with this project it will be essential to get the international expert community involved.

Let me stress that we are open for discussing other possible elements of the Treaty as well. But whatever the case, we must speed up our efforts to fix the European security architecture. If we do not, we will only see it degrade further, as well as face growing crisis in security and arms control.

True, the non-proliferation regime we inherited is not best suited to today’s tasks. But even this regime has not exhausted its positive potential, although there are some obvious problems, such as cracks and holes in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lack of progress in making the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxic Weapons more effective, and also the murky prospects for entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

We attach exceptional importance to concluding a new, legally binding Russian-American agreement on nuclear disarmament. It should replace the START Treaty that expires in 2009. But what we need is a treaty and not a declaration. We hope for a positive reaction to our proposal from the USA.

Everything I have proposed today has great importance for Europe. I invite you to take part in honest and unbiased dialogue at a forum especially devoted to this issue. The leaders of all European countries and all the key Euro-Atlantic organizations could take part, all those who hold dear the world’s future, confident development and peoples’ peace. I hope that our voices will be heard and that this initiative will receive support.

Thank you for your attention.

Source: GlobalSecurity.Org

Putin Teaches Judo

2008-10-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

Mama Bear likes men who can kick butt.

Stratfor: The German Question

2008-10-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

By George Friedman

German Chancellor Angela Merkel went to St. Petersburg last week for meetings with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The central question on the table was Germany’s position on NATO expansion, particularly with regard to Ukraine and Georgia. Merkel made it clear at a joint press conference that Germany would oppose NATO membership for both of these countries, and that it would even oppose placing the countries on the path to membership. Since NATO operates on the basis of consensus, any member nation can effectively block any candidate from NATO membership.

The fact that Merkel and Germany have chosen this path is of great significance. Merkel acted in full knowledge of the U.S. view on the matter and is prepared to resist any American pressure that might follow. It should be remembered that Merkel might be the most pro-American politician in Germany, and perhaps its most pro-American chancellor in years. Moreover, as an East German, she has a deep unease about the Russians. Reality, however, overrode her personal inclinations. More than other countries, Germany does not want to alienate the United States. But it is in a position to face American pressure should any come.

Energy Dependence and Defense Spending
In one sense, Merkel’s reasons for her stance are simple. Germany is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas. If the supply were cut off, Germany’s situation would be desperate — or at least close enough that the distinction would be academic. Russia might decide it could not afford to cut off natural gas exports, but Merkel is dealing with a fundamental German interest, and risking that for Ukrainian or Georgian membership in NATO is not something she is prepared to do.

She can’t bank on Russian caution in a matter such as this, particularly when the Russians seem to be in an incautious mood. Germany is, of course, looking to alternative sources of energy for the future, and in five years its dependence on Russia might not be nearly as significant. But five years is a long time to hold your breath, and Germany can’t do it.

The German move is not just about natural gas, however. Germany views the U.S. obsession with NATO expansion as simply not in Germany’s interests.

First, expanding NATO guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia is meaningless. NATO and the United States don’t have the military means to protect Ukraine or Georgia, and incorporating them into the alliance would not increase European security. From a military standpoint, NATO membership for the two former Soviet republics is an empty gesture, while from a political standpoint, Berlin sees it as designed to irritate the Russians for no clear purpose.

Next, were NATO prepared to protect Ukraine and Georgia, all NATO countries including Germany would be forced to increase defense expenditures substantially. This is not something that Germany and the rest of NATO want to do.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Germany spent 1945-1992 being the potential prime battleground of the Cold War. It spent 1992-2008 not being the potential prime battleground. Germany prefers the latter, and it does not intend to be drawn into a new Cold War under any circumstances. This has profound implications for the future of both NATO and U.S.-German relations.

Germany is thus in the midst of a strategic crisis in which it must make some fundamental decisions. To understand the decisions Germany has to make, we need to understand the country’s geopolitical problem and the decisions it has made in the past.

The German Geopolitical Problem
Until 1871, Germany was fragmented into dozens of small states — kingdoms, duchies, principalities, etc. — comprising the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire. The German-speaking world was torn apart by internal tensions and the constant manipulation of foreign powers.

The southeastern part of the German-speaking world, Austria, was the center of the multinational Hapsburg Empire. It was Roman Catholic and was continually intruding into the predominantly Catholic regions of the rest of Germany, particularly Bavaria. The French were constantly poaching in the Rhineland and manipulating the balance of power among the German states. Russia was always looming to the east, where it bordered the major Protestant German power, Prussia. (Poland at the time was divided among Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary.) Germany was perpetually the victim of great powers, a condition which Prussia spent the roughly half-century between Waterloo and German unification trying to correct.

To unify Germany, Prussia had to do more than dominate the Germans. It had to fight two wars. The first was in 1866 with the Hapsburg Empire, which Prussia defeated in seven weeks, ending Hapsburg influence in Germany and ultimately reducing Austria-Hungary to Germany’s junior partner. The second war was in 1870-1871, when Prussia led a German coalition that defeated France. That defeat ended French influence in the Rhineland and gave Prussia the space in which to create a modern, unified Germany. Russia, which was pleased to see both Austria-Hungary and France defeated and viewed a united Germany as a buffer against another French invasion, did not try to block unification.

German unification changed the dynamic of Europe. First, it created a large nation in the heart of Europe between France and Russia. United, Germany was economically dynamic, and its growth outstripped that of France and the United Kingdom. Moreover, it became a naval power, developing a substantial force that at some point could challenge British naval hegemony. It became a major exporting power, taking markets from Britain and France. And in looking around for room to maneuver, Germany began looking east toward Russia. In short, Germany was more than a nation — it was a geopolitical problem.

Germany’s strategic problem was that if the French and Russians attacked Germany simultaneously, with Britain blockading its ports, Germany would lose and revert to its pre-1871 chaos. Given French, Russian and British interest in shattering Germany, Germany had to assume that such an attack would come. Therefore, since the Germans could not fight on two fronts simultaneously, they needed to fight a war pre-emptively, attacking France or Russia first, defeating it and then turning their full strength on the other — all before Britain’s naval blockade could begin to hurt. Germany’s only defense was a two-stage offense that was as complex as a ballet, and would be catastrophic if it failed.

In World War I, executing the Schlieffen Plan, the Germans attacked France first while trying to simply block the Russians. The plan was to first occupy the channel coast and Paris before the United Kingdom could get into the game and before Russia could fully mobilize, and then to knock out Russia. The plan failed in 1914 at the First Battle of the Marne, and rather than lightning victory, Germany got bogged down in a multifront war costing millions of lives and lasting years. Even so, Germany almost won the war of attrition, causing the United States to intervene and deprive Berlin of victory.

In World War II, the Germans had learned their lesson, so instead of trying to pin down Russia, they entered into a treaty with the Soviets. This secured Germany’s rear by dividing Poland with the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed to the treaty, expecting Adolf Hitler’s forces to attack France and bog down as Germany had in World War I. The Soviets would then roll West after the bloodletting had drained the rest of Europe. The Germans stunned the Russians by defeating France in six weeks and then turning on the Russians. The Russian front turned into an endless bloodletting, and once again the Americans helped deliver the final blow.

The consequence of the war was the division of Germany into three parts — an independent Austria, a Western-occupied West Germany and a Soviet-occupied East Germany. West Germany again faced the Russian problem. Its eastern part was occupied, and West Germany could not possibly defend itself on its own. It found itself integrated into an American-dominated alliance system, NATO, which was designed to block the Soviets. West and East Germany would serve as the primary battleground of any Soviet attack, with Soviet armor facing U.S. armor, airpower and tactical nuclear weapons. For the Germans, the Cold War was probably more dangerous than either of the previous wars. Whatever the war’s outcome, Germany stood a pretty good chance of being annihilated if it took place.

On the upside, the Cold War did settle Franco-German tensions, which were half of Germany’s strategic problem. Indeed, one of the by-products of the Cold War was the emergence of the European Community, which ultimately became the European Union. This saw German economic union and integration with France, which along with NATO’s military integration guaranteed economic growth and the end of any military threat to Germany from the west. For the first time in centuries, the Rhine was not at risk. Germany’s south was secure, and once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no threat from the east, either.

United and Secure at Last?
For the first time in centuries, Germany was both united and militarily secure. But underneath it all, the Germans retained their primordial fear of being caught between France and Russia. Berlin understood that this was far from a mature reality; it was no more than a theoretical problem at the moment. But the Germans also understand how quickly things can change. On one level, the problem was nothing more than the economic emphasis of the European Union compared to the geopolitical focus of Russia. But on a deeper level, Germany was, as always, caught between the potentially competing demands of Russia and the West. Even if the problem were small now, there were no guarantees that it wouldn’t grow.

This was the context in which Germany viewed the Russo-Georgian war in August. Berlin saw not only the United States moving toward a hostile relationship with Russia, but also the United Kingdom and France going down the same path.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who happened to hold the rotating EU presidency at the time, went to Moscow to negotiate a cease-fire on behalf of the European Union. When the Russians seemed unwilling to comply with the terms negotiated, France became highly critical of Russia and inclined to back some sort of sanctions at the EU summit on Georgia. With the United Kingdom being even more adamant, Germany saw a worst-case scenario looming on the distant horizon: It understood that the pleasant security of the post-Cold War world was at an end, and that it had to craft a new national strategy.

From Germany’s point of view, the re-emergence of Russian influence in the former Soviet Union might be something that could have been blocked in the 1990s, but by 2008, it had become inevitable. The Germans saw that economic relations in the former Soviet Union — and not only energy issues — created a complementary relationship between Russia and its former empire. Between natural affinities and Russian power, a Russian sphere of influence, if not a formal structure, was inevitable. It was an emerging reality that could not be reversed.

France has Poland and Germany between itself and Russia. Britain has that plus the English Channel, and the United States has all that plus the Atlantic Ocean. The farther away from Russia one is, the more comfortable one can be challenging Moscow. But Germany has only Poland as a buffer. For any nation serious about resisting Russian power, the first question is how to assure the security of the Baltic countries, a long-vulnerable salient running north from Poland. The answer would be to station NATO forces in the Baltics and in Poland, and Berlin understood that Germany would be both the logistical base for these forces as well as the likely source of troops. But Germany’s appetite for sending troops to Poland and the Baltics has been satiated. This was not a course Germany wanted to take.

Pondering German History
We suspect that Merkel knew something else; namely, that all the comfortable assumptions about what was possible and impossible — that the Russians wouldn’t dare attack the Baltics — are dubious in the extreme. Nothing in German history would convince any reasonable German that military action to achieve national ends is unthinkable. Nor are the Germans prepared to dismiss the re-emergence of Russian military power. The Germans had been economically and militarily shattered in 1932. By 1938, they were the major power in Europe. As long as their officer corps and technological knowledge base were intact, regeneration could move swiftly.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and its military power crumbled. But as was the case in Weimar Germany, the Russian officer corps remained relatively intact and the KGB, the heart of the Soviet state, remained intact if renamed. So did the technological base that made the Soviets a global power. As with Germany after both world wars, Russia was in chaos, but its fragments remained, awaiting reconstruction. The Germans were not about to dismiss Russia’s ability to regenerate — they know their own history too well to do that.

If Germany were to join those who call for NATO expansion, the first step toward a confrontation with Russia would have been taken. The second step would be guaranteeing the security of the Baltics and Poland. America would make the speeches, and Germans would man the line. After spending most of the last century fighting or preparing to fight the Russians, the Germans looked around at the condition of their allies and opted out.

The Germans see their economic commitment as being to the European Union. That binds them to the French, and this is not a bond they can or want to break. But the European Union carries no political or military force in relation to the Russians. Beyond economics, it is a debating society. NATO, as an institution built to resist the Russians, is in an advanced state of decay. To resurrect it, the Germans would have to pay a steep economic price. And if they paid that price, they would be carrying much of the strategic risk.

So while Germany remains committed to its economic relationship with the West, it does not intend to enter into a military commitment against the Russians at this time. If the Americans want to send troops to protect the Baltics and Poland, they are welcome to do so. Germany has no objection — nor do they object to a French or British presence there. Indeed, once such forces were committed, Germany might reconsider its position. But since military deployments in significant numbers are unlikely anytime soon, the Germans view grand U.S. statements about expanded NATO membership as mere bravado by a Washington that is prepared to risk little.

NATO After the German Shift
Therefore, Merkel went to St. Petersburg and told the Russians that Germany does not favor NATO expansion. More than that, the Germans at least implicitly told the Russians that they have a free hand in the former Soviet Union as far as Germany is concerned — an assertion that cost Berlin nothing, since the Russians do enjoy a free hand there. But even more critically, Merkel signaled to the Russians and the West that Germany does not intend to be trapped between Western ambitions and Russian power this time. It does not want to recreate the situation of the two world wars or the Cold War, so Berlin will stay close to France economically and also will accommodate the Russians.

The Germans will thus block NATO’s ambitions, something that represents a dramatic shift in the Western alliance. This shift in fact has been unfolding for quite a while, but it took the Russo-Georgian war to reveal the change.

NATO has no real military power to project to the east, and none can be created without a major German effort, which is not forthcoming. The German shift leaves the Baltic countries exposed and extremely worried, as they should be. It also leaves the Poles in their traditional position of counting on countries far away to guarantee their national security. In 1939, Warsaw counted on the British and French; today, Warsaw depends on the United States. As in 1939, these guarantees are tenuous, but they are all the Poles have.

The United States has the option of placing a nuclear umbrella over the Baltics and Eastern Europe, which would guarantee a nuclear strike on Russia in the event of an attack in either place. While this was the guarantee made to Western Europe in the Cold War, it is unlikely that the United States is prepared for global thermonuclear war over Estonia’s fate. Such a U.S. guarantee to the Baltics and Eastern Europe simply would not represent a credible threat.

The other U.S. option is a major insertion of American forces either by sea through Danish waters or via French and German ports and railways, assuming France or Germany would permit their facilities to be used for such a deployment. But this option is academic at the moment. The United States could not deploy more than symbolic forces even if it wanted to. For the moment, NATO is therefore an entity that issues proclamations, not a functioning military alliance, in spite of (or perhaps because of) deployments in Afghanistan.

Everything in German history has led to this moment. The country is united and wants to be secure. It will not play the role it was forced into during the Cold War, nor will it play geopolitical poker as it did in the first and second world wars. And that means NATO is permanently and profoundly broken. The German question now turns into the Russian question: If Germany is out of the game, what is to be done about Russia?

See original article here on www.stratfor.com.

Pat Buchanan to Sarah Palin on Russia

2008-10-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

Pat Buchanan wrote an open letter to Sarah Palin. Here what he says to Sarah about Russia:

"Trouble is, your tutors also believe we’re still engaged in “World War III,” the Cold War with Russia. So maybe the Gipper didn’t win that one after all. In fact, neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz chided Reagan for appeasing Moscow. And when terrorists struck the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, Reagan, instead of “staying the course,” withdrew our troops. Your Beltway suitors prescribe the opposite of Reagan’s strategy.

And as they would have it, we’re not only waging World Wars III and IV, we’re still fighting World War II. At least, that’s the way it sounds when Robert Kagan opens a Washington Post op-ed by likening Russia’s conflict with Georgia to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

But Russia is not Germany, Georgia is no innocent Czechoslovakia, and Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler—no matter what your guru Randy Scheunemann says. (He probably forgot to tell you that he used to lobby for the government of Georgia.)

Here’s a hint: don’t believe everything you read in the papers, especially if the byline is Kristol or Krauthammer. Russia is not an expansionist, ideological empire. It’s a traditional, semi-authoritarian great power intent on preserving its influence in its own backyard and its prestige on the world stage. That’s why Russia intercedes in the domestic disputes of unruly states on its periphery. Putin balks at Poland hosting our antimissile systems for the same reason we would bristle at Cuba or Mexico receiving Chinese antitank missiles.

With more validity, some of the people whispering in your ear tell you that Moscow wants to corner the European markets for oil and natural gas. And what nefarious end does Putin have in mind? Raising prices and reinforcing Moscow’s political clout, not with nuclear blackmail but with good, old-fashioned economic power. We have plenty of that ourselves (or at least we used to). Putin, far from being a totalitarian ideologue, is an economic nationalist, as the leaders of great powers traditionally have been."

Read full text here.

Spiegel: Did Saakashvili Lie?

2008-09-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

According to Spiegel, NATO experts knew that Saakashvili started the war. It is despicable that the Washington officials have blamed Russia for the conflict, even with this intelligence information.

"One thing was already clear to the officers at NATO headquarters in Brussels: They thought that the Georgians had started the conflict and that their actions were more calculated than pure self-defense or a response to Russian provocation. In fact, the NATO officers believed that the Georgian attack was a calculated offensive against South Ossetian positions to create the facts on the ground, and they coolly treated the exchanges of fire in the preceding days as minor events. Even more clearly, NATO officials believed, looking back, that by no means could these skirmishes be seen as justification for Georgian war preparations.

The NATO experts did not question the Georgian claim that the Russians had provoked them by sending their troops through the Roki Tunnel. But their evaluation of the facts was dominated by skepticism that these were the true reasons for Saakashvili's actions.

The details that Western intelligence agencies extracted from their signal intelligence agree with NATO's assessments. According to this intelligence information, the Georgians amassed roughly 12,000 troops on the border with South Ossetia on the morning of Aug. 7. Seventy-five tanks and armored personnel carriers -- a third of the Georgian military's arsenal -- were assembled near Gori. Saakashvili's plan, apparently, was to advance to the Roki Tunnel in a 15-hour blitzkrieg and close the eye of the needle between the northern and southern Caucasus regions, effectively cutting off South Ossetia from Russia.

At 10:35 p.m. on Aug. 7, less than an hour before Russian tanks entered the Roki Tunnel, according to Saakashvili, Georgian forces began their artillery assault on Tskhinvali. The Georgians used 27 rocket launchers, including 152-millimeter guns, as well as cluster bombs. Three brigades began the nighttime assault.

The intelligence agencies were monitoring the Russian calls for help on the airwaves. The 58th Army, part of which was stationed in North Ossetia, was apparently not ready for combat, at least not during that first night.

The Georgian army, on the other hand, consisted primarily of infantry groups, which were forced to travel along major roads. It soon became bogged down and was unable to move past Tskhinvali. Western intelligence learned that the Georgians were experiencing "handling problems" with their weapons. The implication was that the Georgians were not fighting well.

The intelligence agencies conclude that the Russian army did not begin firing until 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 8, when it launched an SS-21 short-range ballistic missile on the city of Borzhomi, southwest of Gori. The missile apparently hit military and government bunker positions. Russian warplanes began their first attacks on the Georgian army a short time later. Suddenly the airwaves came to life, as did the Russian army.

Russian troops from North Ossetia did not begin marching through the Roki Tunnel until roughly 11 a.m. This sequence of events is now seen as evidence that Moscow did not act offensively, but merely reacted. Additional SS-21s were later moved to the south. The Russians deployed 5,500 troops to Gori and 7,000 to the border between Georgia and its second separatist region, Abkhazia."

Forty Days of Mourning: Church Services Held in South Ossetia and Across Russia

2008-09-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Kommersant.ru:
About seven thousand people gathered on September 16, 2008 at the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow to mourn the South Ossetian victims.


	enlarge photo ...

Lenta.ru:
French Newspaper Refuses to Print Condolences for Ossetians
(Translated from Russian)

"The French newspaper Liberation on Tuesday refused to issue condolences from the Russian Embassy in France to the relatives of the victims in South Ossetia, according to RIA Novosti with reference to the spokesperson of the Embassy Sergei Parinov.

Condolences were to be printed in connection with the 40-day mourning, which was observed on September 16.

According to the diplomat, an agreement with the newspaper was reached on Monday to print a small text with a photo of the destroyed Tskhinvali. The cost of the advertisement was to be nine thousand euros.

The text expressed condolences to the relatives and friends "of victims of the tragedy in South Ossetia - Ossetians, Georgians, Russians." The original version also contained the phrase about "the attack by the regime of Tbilisi", but it was removed during the editing process. Nevertheless, the ad was not printed in the Tuesday's issue of the newspaper. Liberation's representatives reported that the publication of the ad was refused by the editorial board."

RussiaToday:

"Special church services have been held in South Ossetia and across Russia, according to Orthodox tradition, to remember those who died after Georgia launched a military assault on the capital Tskhinval 40 days ago. South Ossetian officials say between 1,500 and 2,000 people may have been killed in the conflict.
In Tskhinval, however, no church service was held, since the local priest also lost relatives and he’s taken this day to mourn. But a memorial meeting attended by a large number of people was held in the South Ossetian capital.

”Forty days have passed. We commemorate now, and will always remember each one of the dead. And we are thankful to those who defended us from Georgia,” one of the mourners said.

Georgia chose this solemn day of remembrance to return the bodies of two Russian air force pilots killed during the conflict. The pilots had been 'missing in action' since their Tu-22M bomber was shot down in August.

An examination of the bodies to determine their identities will now be carried out, said a Russian military spokesman on Tuesday. Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn said the long-range bomber was shot down on 9 August by a Buk-M1 anti-aircraft rocket built in Ukraine.

Memorial services for the victims of the war in South Ossetia are also being held across Russia.

A special commemoration was held in Our Lady of Sorrows church in Moscow. Mourners paid their respects, with many lighting candles for those who died during the conflict.

Overnight, thousands gathered in front of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in the capital to observe a minute’s silence."

The Re-Emerging Russia: Something to Believe in

2008-09-14T20:58:00.000-07:00

Watch the three musketeers who won Eurovision 2008 just a few months before everything went wrong in South Ossetia this summer: Dima Bilan, who tops the pop music charts in Russia, Evgeni Plushenko, Olympic figure-skating champion, and Edvin Marton, a Hungarian-Ukrainian violinist, who studied at Juilliard and plays Stradivarius.

Bilan and Plushenko were in preschool, when perestroika began in Russia over twenty years ago. Marton was in grade school and probably too young to know anything about the USSR crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Watch them without anticipating the best piece of pop music you have ever heard, because it is not. Watch them to see a boy from Karachay-Cherkess Republic, an autonomous region of Russia very similar to how South Ossetia is an autonomous region of Georgia - see him passionately rip open his shirt and understand that this is not a Western attempt to be sexy but the old Russian tradition of swearing by displaying the crucifix that Orthodox believers wear under their shirts. Watch them to see a boy from the Russian Far East, who first stood on figure skates when he was four years old - see his body moving freely and fiercely, with the passion common to Russian souls but rare to others. Watch them to see a young Hungarian, born in Ukraine, who jams his Stradivarius to help his Russian brothers win, symbolizing the new Eastern Europe.

Watch them as symbols of the new re-emerging Russia and read the simple yet spiritual lyrics of the song below.

"As long as I’m breathing
There is not a limit to what I can dream
Believing
Mission to keep climbing
Nothing else can stop me if just I believe"

This is what Russia has been trying to tell you, sometimes rising to the point of screaming - "we are different, we are new, we are here, and we believe that we can do anything". These young men grew up in the free countries, even though the democracies in these countries were imperfect. These men represent the new Eastern Europe and the new Russia.

There is no Soviet Union any more. People who are trying to start Cold War II lost their enemy and want to replace it with the new Russia. They should not be allowed to do that.

(Written by Viktor Belan aka Dima Bilan and Jim Beanz, produced by Jim Beanz)

Even when the thunder and storm begins
I’ll be standing strong like a tree in the wind
Nothing's gonna move this mountain
Or change my direction
I’m falling off that sky and I’m all alone
The courage that’s inside is gonna brake my fall
Nothing’s gonna dim my light within

But if I keep going on
It will never be impossible, not today

Cause I’ve got something to believe in
As long as I’m breathing
There is not a limit to what I can dream
Cause I’ve got something to believe in
Mission to keep climbing
Nothing else can stop me if I just believe
And I believe in me

Even when the world tries to pull me down
Tell me that I can, try to turn me around
I wont let them put my fire out, without no!

But if I keep going on
It will never be impossible, not today

Cause I’ve got something to believe in
As long as I’m breathing
There is not a limit to what I can dream
Cause I’ve got something to believe in
Mission to keep climbing
Nothing else can stop me if I just believe
And I believe:

I can do it all
Open every door
Turn unthinkable to reality
You’ll see- I can do it all and more!

Believing
As long as I’m breathing
There is not a limit to what I can dream
Believing
Mission to keep climbing
Nothing else can stop me if just I believe
And I believe in me.

www.onlylyrics.com

Russia Blog: Daiwa Institute of Research Issues Assessment of the Russo-Georgian War

2008-09-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

Click here to download the PDF report from Russia Blog.

Telegraph.co.uk:Rebel Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher backs Russia over Georgia

2008-09-13T20:15:00.000-07:00

Click here to read the original article.

""The Russians were right; we're wrong," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said at a hearing of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.
"The Georgians started it; the Russians ended it," he added.
Mr Rohrabacher claimed that unidentified intelligence sources had assured him that Georgia started the fighting that began on August 7 when Georgia's military tried to re-establish control over its breakaway, pro-Russian province of South Ossetia.
Russia joined the battle, brutally repelled the Georgian offensive and then pushed deep into Georgia proper, where many of its forces remain nearly a month after the battle ended.
Russia has been condemned by the Bush administration and other countries. Vice-president Dick Cheney visited Georgia and Ukraine, another former Soviet republic, early this month and called Russia's actions "an affront to civilized standards" and "completely unacceptable".
Both US presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, also have issued tough denunciations of Russia.
But Mr Rohrbacher insisted that Georgia was to blame: "The Georgians broke the truce, not the Russians, and no amount of talk of provocation and all this other stuff can alter that fact."
A known rebel, he has taken controversial stands and clashed with the Bush administration in the past.
His comments got little attention in the United States but have been played prominently on state-run Russian television bulletins and other media.
Mr Rohrabacher's Democratic opponent in November's elections, Debbie Cook, condemned his comments.
"Congressman Rohrabacher's statements about the situation in Georgia are unnecessary and continue his pattern of reckless comments," her campaign manager, Kevin Thurman, said."

Obama or McCain?

2008-09-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

In the article quoted below, John Toradze makes a conclusion that, on the basis of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the lesser of the two evils. I am a conservative, so the socialist Obama is not a choice for me at all. However, after being insulted by McCain's "We are all Georgians" comment, and after Sarah Palin, to whom I can relate on all other issues, said in an interview given to ABC's Charles Gibson that Ukraine and Georgia must be accepted to NATO and left open the possibility of war with Russia, I cannot vote for the Republican ticket either.

The behavior of Bush, Cheney, McCain, Rice, and all the other Cold Warriors, who screwed up our relationship with Russia, is outrageous, unfair, and criminal. History will not judge them kindly.

After the worst foreign policy in history, whom to choose, Obama or McCain?, By John Toradze, OpEdNews.com, September 9, 2008

"...Both Republicans and Democrats have been blundering to the point of idiocy toward Russia. We are already in a new era, and we put ourselves there by proving to Russia that our solutions for them are worthless. We gave them shock treatment and it nearly destroyed them. We proved that we won't help them and probably aren't capable of it, when we gave them IMF loans like a thunderstorm on a desert, which put criminals and fools in power there, washing away civil society. We followed that up by suddenly cutting off the money and denying them credit, resulting in starvation. We proved that whether they are weak or strong, friendly or not, we will treat them as an enemy when we pressed to expand NATO and then bombed Serbia, which is culturally to Russia like England is to the USA. Additionally, we showed that we will disregard any claims they may have based on their investments and will do our best to cut them out of revenue streams when we kicked them out of Iraq with billions invested outstanding and refused to split the oil flow from central Asia with a Russian pipeline. All of these moves appear completely sensible to the USA and we sincerely believe that we are righteously correct. And yet ...

Consider that the USA has encircled Russia, pressing on their borders by expanding NATO through Democratic and Republican administrations. Meanwhile, both Democratic and Republican administrations have treated China with comparative kid gloves. We have shown China respect and pursued business deals there with élan. Now please note that China has yet to make any real gesture remotely similar to taking down the Berlin Wall. The message we sent is clear. Shows of weakness and demonstrations of good faith will be treated with a mixture of ignorance, contempt and possibly deliberate malice. That is, in a nutshell, the background and what we see Russia doing is what it must do to get what it needs to survive. Perhaps Russia will be able to thrive.

The Kremlin has, quite clearly, absorbed the message we sent them; that if a nation such as China goes so far as to knock one of our spy planes out of the sky, we will respond with respect and be happy to trade with them; that if a strong nation demands the return of territory it lost half a century ago, we will talk nice about it. But if Russia wants to get back territory that was Russia’s 20 years ago, we do what? Consider that China, with no gesture toward our values at all has been essentially told that we will not recognize Taiwan as not being theirs.

Contrast this with what Russia has experienced with Georgia and Ukraine. Now, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, our stupidity, demonstrated by academics, government policy and programs, executive orders and absurdist “diplomacy,” the world has already changed. But nobody recognizes it yet from either party. In fact, I believe that to do so would be taboo in our national culture. As a result, now, we are only reacting, and our reactions are no better than what went before.

Folks, we are not in the driver’s seat anymore with Russia. We are dealing now with an opponent we insisted on having, an opponent that is now largely of our own making. The USA would not put up with Russia bringing an independent Washington State (somewhat like the country of Georgia) into an alliance between Russia and China. Nor would the USA put up with California declaring its independence (like Ukraine) and then becoming allied with the same Asian power axis. Not on your life would we accept that! And if, like Russia, to compound that, we had China just to our southern border, we would be extremely alarmed. That is what Russia’s situation is like. America needs to “get it.”..."

Pat Buchanan - A prophet is not without honor save in his own country

2008-09-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

If only somebody in the White House listened to Pat Buchanan in the last few years, we would not be in the situation in which we are finding ourselves now. Pompous ass Rush Limbaugh, when encountering a Russian Jewish conservative caller, who had some bad words to say about Saakashvili, insulted the caller comparing him to Barack Obama. Any time Limbaugh, a man who could not finish his college education, hears opposing views, he cannot put together a good argument on why that opposing view is wrong; he just calls the opponent names.

Okay, here is Pat Buchanan, a man who graduated from Georgetown and Columbia, telling neo-cons like Rush, another pompous jerk Bill Kristol, Russophobe Condi Rice, and others, why Russians like Putin and do not like America the way they used to.

1. Russia is Not a Lost Cause, Townhall.com, July 15, 2006

"...consider how we have dealt with Russia's interests and sensitivities.

Listening to U.S. advisers on how to privatize the wealth of the Soviet state, Russians saw their national assets looted by thieves, hustlers and "oligarchs" welcomed in the West, as their per capita income sank and their social security vanished.

They saw the United States bomb into submission a Serb nation Russia had always seen as her Balkan god-child, for Serbia's crime of trying to hold on to her cradle province, Kosovo.

They watched America go back on her word -- given when the Red Army withdrew from Europe -- and push NATO into Poland, the Baltic States, the Balkans, and, now, Ukraine and Georgia. This is the political equivalent of Great Britain -- had the United States come apart in the Civil War -- making Virginia, South Carolina and Texas dominions of the British Empire.
They saw U.S. agents, under cover of Bush's "democracy crusade," effect the defeat of pro-Russian governments in Kiev and Tiblisi -- though the project failed in Minsk -- and the election of regimes pledged to reorient their policies toward the EU, NATO and the United States.

They saw Americans colluding with former provinces of the Soviet Union to develop pipelines that would bypass not only Iranian territory, but also Russian territory.

They saw the U.S. bases in Central Asia they had approved for the Afghan war taking on a permanent character.

They listened as U.S. neoconservatives cheered for Chechen rebels and officials from Cheney to McCain bashed Putin and Russia, with some calling for her expulsion from the G-8.

Putin concluded, not incorrectly, that these Americans do not want partners, they want poodles. But Putin is not Blair. A patriot and nationalist, he has set about restoring Moscow's independence and self-respect, and started looking out for Russia first. He was determined to stand up for Russia, even if it meant standing up to the United States, which is why so many Russians respect him.

He imposed a flat tax, stripped the oligarchs of their assets and jailed them or ran them out of the country, liquidated the Chechen murderers of Beslan, started using his oil wealth the way great powers always do, and began to reorient his foreign policy without consulting Washington, as Washington never consulted him.

Though the West is losing Russia, Russia is not lost. But the minimal price of regaining Russian good will is to start treating her like a great nation. That means getting out of her face, getting our alliance off her front porch, and getting our bases and our Cold War agitprop agencies and pests out of her back yard.

Russia today threatens no vital interest of the United States. Is it too much to ask that we treat Russia and her "space" the way we want Russia and Russians to treat ours?"

2. Georgia - On Moscow's Mind, Buchanan.org, October 24, 2006

"...Were Georgia in NATO today, this crisis would have escalated into a confrontation between Washington and Moscow. For under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, an attack against one member is to be treated as an attack against all. Thus, a collision of Russian forces in South Ossetia with Georgian forces could bring America and Russia to the brink of war.

Russian leaders contend that Saakashvili has been building up his military to invade and recapture the breakaway regions, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has implied that Saakashvili ignited the crisis after visits to Washington and NATO headquarters.

No hard evidence has surfaced to substantiate this charge. But if Saakashvili was put up to creating this crisis by anyone in the United States, it was an act of colossal stupidity. What do we do now?

There seems little we can do if Putin is determined to bring down Saakashvili. Russia is flush with oil and gas revenue and $250 billion in cash reserves; Moscow is moving closer to China; and Putin is far more popular in his country than Bush and Blair are in theirs.

Bush bought into the notion that U.S. vital interests required supporting ex-Russian republics against Moscow, which was absurd. Our vital interest was always in maintaining strong U.S.-Russian ties, which have been ravaged by the meddling of neoconservatives mired in Russophobia.

As for who rules Ukraine or Georgia, for two centuries that was never a vital interest of ours. Thus there is no reason to extend NATO war guarantees to Ukraine, the Caucasus or Central Asia.

The destiny of that region will be determined by the dominant powers that reside there: Russia, China, Turkey, Iran. Not by us."

3. Does Putin Not Have a Point?, Buchanan.org, February 13, 2007

"...one of the historic blunders of this administration has been to antagonize and alienate Russia, the winning of whose friendship was a signal achievement of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And one of the foreign policy imperatives of this nation is for statesmanship to repair the damage.
What did we do to antagonize Russia?
When the Cold War ended, we seized upon our “unipolar moment” as the lone superpower to seek geopolitical advantage at Russia’s expense.
Though the Red Army had picked up and gone home from Eastern Europe voluntarily, and Moscow felt it had an understanding we would not move NATO eastward, we exploited our moment. Not only did we bring Poland into NATO, we brought in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and virtually the whole Warsaw Pact, planting NATO right on Mother Russia’s front porch. Now, there is a scheme afoot to bring in Ukraine and Georgia in the Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin.
Second, America backed a pipeline to deliver Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, to bypass Russia.
Third, though Putin gave us a green light to use bases in the old Soviet republics for the liberation of Afghanistan, we now seem hellbent on making those bases in Central Asia permanent.
Fourth, though Bush sold missile defense as directed at rogue states like North Korea, we now learn we are going to put anti-missile systems into Eastern Europe. And against whom are they directed?
Fifth, through the National Endowment for Democracy, its GOP and Democratic auxiliaries, and tax-exempt think tanks, foundations and “human rights” institutes such as Freedom House, headed by ex-CIA director James Woolsey, we have been fomenting regime change in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics and Russia herself.
U.S.-backed revolutions have succeeded in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, but failed in Belarus. Moscow has now legislated restrictions on the foreign agencies that it sees, not without justification, as subversive of pro-Moscow regimes.
Sixth, America conducted 78 days of bombing of Serbia for the crime of fighting to hold on to her rebellious province, Kosovo, and for refusing to grant NATO marching rights through her territory to take over that province. Mother Russia has always had a maternal interest in the Orthodox states of the Balkans.
These are Putin’s grievances. Does he not have a small point?
Joe Lieberman denounced Putin’s “Cold War rhetoric.” But have we not been taking what cannot unfairly be labeled Cold War actions?
How would we react if China today brought Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela into a military alliance, convinced Mexico to sell oil to Beijing and bypass the United States, and began meddling in the affairs of Central America and Caribbean countries to effect the electoral defeat of regimes friendly to the United States? How would we react to a Russian move to put anti-missile missiles on Greenland?
Gates says we have been through one Cold War and do not want another. But it is not Moscow moving a military alliance right up to our borders or building bases and planting anti-missile systems in our front and back yards.
Why are we doing this? This country is not going to go to war with Russia over Estonia. With our Army “breaking” from two insurgencies, how would we fight? By bombing Moscow and St. Petersburg?
Just as we deluded ourselves into believing this war would be a “cakewalk,” that democracy would break out across the Middle East, that we would be beloved in Baghdad, so America today has undertaken commitments, dating to the Cold War and since, we do not remotely have the resources or will to fulfill. We are living in a world of self-delusion.
Somewhere in this presidential campaign, someone has to bring us back to earth. The halcyon days of American Empire are over."

PJB: Who Started Cold War II?

2008-09-08T20:30:00.000-07:00

By Patrick J. Buchanan, August 19, 2008
See full article here on Pat's blog.

The article speaks for itself, but I highlighted the paragraphs I especially agree with.

"The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.

Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.

If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.

From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.

Truman refused to use force to break Stalin’s Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter’s response to Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did — nothing.

These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.

The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.

Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.

And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?

As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?

For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.

If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?

The swift and decisive action of Putin’s army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.

What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin’s trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?

Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.

The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.

The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.

Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation’s primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.

A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.

Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?

As for Saakashvili, he’s probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute."

Why Joe Biden is bad for Russia

2008-09-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

Joseph Biden, a Democrat Party Vice-Presidential candidate, would undoubtedly influence how Barack Obama handles the relationships with Russia, if elected.

Global Research, by Umberto Pascali, August 28, 2008

On Aug 27 2008 at the Democratic Convention in Denver, Vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden presented the plan for the real war, the war against China, Russia. He repeated the key points pushed by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his obsessive determination to go to the final clash with Russia and Asia.

For Biden, The greates mistake of the Bush administration was its failure "to face the biggest forces shaping this century. The emergence of Russia, China and India's great powers".

What was the "consequence of this neglect"? "Russia challenging… Georgia's freedom." The Obama-Biden administration will repair those criminal mistakes... Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable."

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D., in an article "Let My People Go - Russian Jews and the Jackson-Vanik Controversy", published in 2002, writes:

"The Senate still refuses to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment despite its impact on six former Soviet republics and other countries and despite passionate pleas from the administration. On May 22 it passed a non-binding resolution calling for PNTR with Russia. Jackson-Vanik remained in place because of the row with Russia over imports of US poultry.

Senator Joseph Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who represents a major poultry producing state (Delaware) made these statesmanlike comments following the session:

"I can either be Russia's best friend or worst enemy. They keep fooling around like this, they're going to have me as their enemy."

Mikhail Margelov, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Federation Council, understandably retorted, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty quoting from strana.ru:

"By citing the controversy over chicken legs, the Democrats have openly acknowledged that Jackson-Vanik does not protect Russian Jews, but American farmers."

According to ITAR-TASS, he presented to President Putin a report which blamed Russia's "unstable" trade relations with the USA on the latter's "discriminatory legislative norms".

The Amendment has been a dead letter since 1994, due to a well-entrenched ritual of annual Presidential waiver which precedes the granting of NTR status to Russia. The waiver is based on humiliating semi-annual reviews. The sole remaining function of Jackson-Vanik seems, therefore, to be derogatory.

This infuriates Russians of all stripes - pro-Western reformers included. "This demonstrates the double standards of the U.S." - Anatoly B. Chubais, the Chairman of UES, Russia's electricity monopoly, told BusinessWeek. "It undermines trust." Putin called the law "notorious".

In October last year, the Russian Foreign Ministry released this unusually strongly-worded statement:

"The Jackson-Vanik Amendment has blocked the granting to Russia of most favored nation status in trade with the USA on a permanent and unconditional basis over many years, inflicting harm upon the spirit of constructive and equal cooperation between our countries. It is rightly considered one of the last anachronisms of the era of confrontation and distrust."

Considering that China - with its awful record of egregious human rights violations - was granted PNTR last year, Russia rightly feels slighted. Its non-recognition as a "market economy" under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment led to the imposition of import restrictions on some of its products (e.g. steel). The Amendment also prevents Russia from joining the WTO."

This article was written several years ago. Russian Jews, for whose benefit the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was made law, have been safely emigrating to Israel and other countries. However, there are numerous obstacles for Russia's acceptance to WTO. No wonder that Prime Minister Putin is not eager to maintain its commitments with WTO at this time. And no wonder that Joe Biden is the enemy of Russia.

Medvedev: Unipolarity is unacceptable

2008-09-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

www.russiatoday.com

Russia's President says his decision to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia won't change. Here's what Dmitry Medvedev had to say in an interview with Russia's main television stations.

Q: The situation around South Ossetia and Abkhazia has been developing for some 17 long years. Why was the decision to recognise their independence made at the time when Georgia attacked Tskhinval? Were there any other options?

M: I believe that in the circumstances which had come about that decision was inevitable. Today, the efficiency of that decision is obvious to everyone. For 17 years we’d been trying to glue together a country that had already fallen apart. We’d been trying to encourage a resolution one way or another. Our peacekeepers had been carrying out their service round the clock, helping to keep apart the conflicting parties. In the 1990s we managed to prevent tremendous bloodshed. Perhaps a chance for resolution might have remained, if not for the idiotic action undertaken by the Georgian government. In essence that action put an end to any prospects of the co-existence of Georgians, Ossetians and Abkhazians in one country. It didn’t just put an end to this, it also caused a large number of deaths. Peaceful citizens died, including our citizens. Peacekeepers that had worked to keep apart the conflicting sides died. The fact that the Georgian peacekeepers were shooting at their colleagues during that campaign is especially atrocious. All these facts together brought about the development of events according to the most difficult scenario. We had no other option but to respond to this barefaced, brazen behaviour. We had to put things back in order and to provide for the lives and dignity of the people living in South Ossetia. You realise that a separate plan of attack was being developed for Abkhazia, as our General Staff has shown. Its scenario was absolutely the same. So we made our decisions in order to prevent more genocide and the total disappearance of both Ossetians and Abkhazians from those territories. I will repeat that life has demonstrated their absolute obviousness and necessity.

Q: The reaction of our western partners to the decision made by Russia was quite foreseeable: from the moderately critical to the harsh. What reaction are we expecting from our close neighbours, like the CIS countries? And how important is it for Russia whether many other countries follow our example and recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia? How will this affect our next steps?

M: We’ve already taken all the steps necessary for Russia. As you understand it wasn’t an easy decision. But those decisions were necessary and sufficient. Other countries have responded in different ways, and I guess this is the way it should be. The reaction of our close neighbours has been quite objective. I’ve met with most leaders during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. They understand the motives behind the actions which Russia has undertaken. Recognition is a different issue. I’d like to repeat that recognition is up to each country individually. No collective actions can be taken here. Look at the example of Kosovo. It’s obvious that in this situation some countries will agree with the creation of new states, and other countries will consider it untimely. But let me remind you that international law is based on the fact that the legal existence, as the lawyers put it, of a new state comes into being at the moment of recognition of this new state by at least one other country. Thus from the legal viewpoint, the new states have appeared. The process of their recognition may take quite a long time. But this will not change our position in any way. We’ve made our decision irreversibly. It is our duty to provide for peace and order in the region. That’s what we’ll be basing our actions on.

Q: What is Russia going to do in those republics?

M: We will definitely help those republics in every way possible. At present we’ve been developing international agreements with the two countries: between the Russian Federation and Abkhazia, and between the Russian Federation and South Ossetia accordingly. These international agreements will set forth all our obligations of economic, social, humanitarian and military support and assistance. We will have proper, complete and legal international relations.

Q: It is clear to everyone right now that since August 8, Russia’s place in the world has changed. Also, the whole system of previous agreements is changing. A number of international institutions have shown themselves totally incapable of solving this conflict. Still, as far as I understand, Russia and the West are not ready to break their relations completely. What do you think is the future of the world order and Russia’s place in it?

M: I will implement Russia's foreign policy on the basis of five points.

First - Russia accepts the superiority of the fundamental principles of international law which determine relations between civilised nations. And within the framework of these principles and this view of international law, we will develop our relations with other countries.

Second - the world should be multi-polar. Unipolarity is unacceptable, dominance is inadmissible. We can't accept a world order where all the decisions are made by one country, even a country as serious and authoritative as the US. This kind of world would be unsteady and conflict prone.

Third - Russia doesn’t want a confrontation with any country, and has no plans to isolate itself. As far as we can, we will develop friendly relations with Europe, the United States and with other countries.

Fourth - protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens is an absolute priority for us, wherever they are. This is where we’ll be starting from in our foreign policy. We'll also be trying to protect the interests of our business community abroad. And it must be clear to all, that if anyone attempts any aggressive action, they will encounter a response.

And fifth - just like other countries, Russia has regions where it has special interests. These regions include states with which our country has had particularly warm and friendly historical ties. We will be working very closely with these regions, and developing our friendly relations with these states, our close neighbours. This is what we will be basing our foreign policy on. As far as the future goes, it doesn’t just depend on us. It also depends on our friends and partners in the international community. They have a choice.

These priority regions are of course the border regions, but not only these.

Q: You mentioned possible retaliatory measures Russia may take in case of aggression. Do you think there is a sufficient legal basis for this? Or do we need a special law for these measures?

All the legal basis is there. The international community has approved the United Nations charter, which clearly outlines the right of a state to protect itself. We have our constitution and we have our special Russian laws on the basis of which retaliatory measures can be taken, including the use of Russian armed forces. The normative basis is there and it works, so there’s no need to change anything.

Q: What about sanctions?

We don't usually approve of sanctions. We use them only in extreme cases. But just like other states we have to use them occasionally. In some countries this is done through special laws. If needed, we will create those laws. But I think that it’s the least productive way.

Solzhenitsyn and the Struggle for Russia's Soul

2008-09-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

www.stratfor.com

By George Friedman (August 5, 2008)

There are many people who write history. There are very few who make history through their writings. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week at the age of 89, was one of them. In many ways, Solzhenitsyn laid the intellectual foundations for the fall of Soviet communism. That is well known. But Solzhenitsyn also laid the intellectual foundation for the Russia that is now emerging. That is less well known, and in some ways more important.

Solzhenitsyn’s role in the Soviet Union was simple. His writings, and in particular his book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” laid bare the nature of the Soviet regime. The book described a day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp, where the guilty and innocent alike were sent to have their lives squeezed out of them in endless and hopeless labor. It was a topic Solzhenitsyn knew well, having been a prisoner in such a camp following service in World War II.

The book was published in the Soviet Union during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev had turned on his patron, Joseph Stalin, after taking control of the Communist Party apparatus following Stalin’s death. In a famous secret speech delivered to the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his murderous ways. Allowing Solzhenitsyn’s book to be published suited Khrushchev. Khrushchev wanted to detail Stalin’s crimes graphically, and Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of life in a labor camp served his purposes.

It also served a dramatic purpose in the West when it was translated and distributed there. Ever since its founding, the Soviet Union had been mythologized. This was particularly true among Western intellectuals, who had been taken by not only the romance of socialism, but also by the image of intellectuals staging a revolution. Vladimir Lenin, after all, had been the author of works such as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.” The vision of intellectuals as revolutionaries gripped many European and American intellectuals.

These intellectuals had missed not only that the Soviet Union was a social catastrophe, but that, far from being ruled by intellectuals, it was being ruled by thugs. For an extraordinarily long time, in spite of ample testimony by emigres from the Soviet regime, Western intellectuals simply denied this reality. When Western intellectuals wrote that they had “seen the future and it worked,” they were writing at a time when the Soviet terror was already well under way. They simply couldn’t see it.

One of the most important things about “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was not only that it was so powerful, but that it had been released under the aegis of the Soviet state, meaning it could not simply be ignored. Solzhenitsyn was critical in breaking the intellectual and moral logjam among intellectuals in the West. You had to be extraordinarily dense or dishonest to continue denying the obvious, which was that the state that Lenin and Stalin had created was a moral monstrosity.

Khrushchev’s intentions were not Solzhenitsyn’s. Khrushchev wanted to demonstrate the evils of Stalinism while demonstrating that the regime could reform itself and, more important, that communism was not invalidated by Stalin’s crimes. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, held the view that the labor camps were not incidental to communism, but at its heart. He argued in his “Gulag Archipelago” that the systemic exploitation of labor was essential to the regime not only because it provided a pool of free labor, but because it imposed a systematic terror on those not in the gulag that stabilized the regime. His most telling point was that while Khrushchev had condemned Stalin, he did not dismantle the gulag; the gulag remained in operation until the end.

Though Solzhenitsyn served the regime’s purposes in the 1960s, his usefulness had waned by the 1970s. By then, Solzhenitsyn was properly perceived by the Soviet regime as a threat. In the West, he was seen as a hero by all parties. Conservatives saw him as an enemy of communism. Liberals saw him as a champion of human rights. Each invented Solzhenitsyn in their own image. He was given the Nobel Prize for Literature, which immunized him against arrest and certified him as a great writer. Instead of arresting him, the Soviets expelled him, sending him into exile in the United States.

When he reached Vermont, the reality of who Solzhenitsyn was slowly sank in. Conservatives realized that while he certainly was an enemy of communism and despised Western liberals who made apologies for the Soviets, he also despised Western capitalism just as much. Liberals realized that Solzhenitsyn hated Soviet oppression, but that he also despised their obsession with individual rights, such as the right to unlimited free expression. Solzhenitsyn was nothing like anyone had thought, and he went from being the heroic intellectual to a tiresome crank in no time. Solzhenitsyn attacked the idea that the alternative to communism had to be secular, individualist humanism. He had a much different alternative in mind.

Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment.

From Solzhenitsyn’s point of view, Western capitalism and liberalism are in their own way as horrible as Stalinism. Adam Smith saw man as primarily pursuing economic ends. Economic man seeks to maximize his wealth. Solzhenitsyn tried to make the case that this is the most pointless life conceivable. He was not objecting to either property or wealth, but to the idea that the pursuit of wealth is the primary purpose of a human being, and that the purpose of society is to free humans to this end.

Solzhenitsyn made the case — hardly unique to him — that the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself left humans empty shells. He once noted Blaise Pascal’s aphorism that humans are so endlessly busy so that they can forget that they are going to die — the point being that we all die, and that how we die is determined by how we live. For Solzhenitsyn, the American pursuit of economic well being was a disease destroying the Western soul.

He viewed freedom of expression in the same way. For Americans, the right to express oneself transcends the content of the expression. That you speak matters more than what you say. To Solzhenitsyn, the same principle that turned humans into obsessive pursuers of wealth turned them into vapid purveyors of shallow ideas. Materialism led to individualism, and individualism led to a culture devoid of spirit. The freedom of the West, according to Solzhenitsyn, produced a horrifying culture of intellectual self-indulgence, licentiousness and spiritual poverty. In a contemporary context, the hedge fund coupled with The Daily Show constituted the bankruptcy of the West.

To have been present when he once addressed a Harvard commencement! On the one side, Harvard Law and Business School graduates — the embodiment of economic man. On the other side, the School of Arts and Sciences, the embodiment of free expression. Both greeted their heroic resister, only to have him reveal himself to be religious, patriotic and totally contemptuous of the Vatican of self-esteem, Harvard.

Solzhenitsyn had no real home in the United States, and with the fall of the Soviets, he could return to Russia — where he witnessed what was undoubtedly the ultimate nightmare for him: thugs not only running the country, but running it as if they were Americans. Now, Russians were pursuing wealth as an end in itself and pleasure as a natural right. In all of this, Solzhenitsyn had not changed at all.

Solzhenitsyn believed there was an authentic Russia that would emerge from this disaster. It would be a Russia that first and foremost celebrated the motherland, a Russia that accepted and enjoyed its uniqueness. This Russia would take its bearings from no one else. At the heart of this Russia would be the Russian Orthodox Church, with not only its spirituality, but its traditions, rituals and art.

The state’s mission would be to defend the motherland, create the conditions for cultural renaissance, and — not unimportantly — assure a decent economic life for its citizens. Russia would be built on two pillars: the state and the church. It was within this context that Russians would make a living. The goal would not be to create the wealthiest state in the world, nor radical equality. Nor would it be a place where anyone could say whatever they wanted, not because they would be arrested necessarily, but because they would be socially ostracized for saying certain things.

Most important, it would be a state not ruled by the market, but a market ruled by a state. Economic strength was not trivial to Solzhenitsyn, either for individuals or for societies, but it was never to be an end in itself and must always be tempered by other considerations. As for foreigners, Russia must always guard itself, as any nation must, against foreigners seeking its wealth or wanting to invade. Solzhenitsyn wrote a book called “August 1914,” in which he argues that the czarist regime had failed the nation by not being prepared for war.

Think now of the Russia that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev are shaping. The Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a massive resurgence, the market is submitting to the state, free expression is being tempered and so on. We doubt Putin was reading Solzhenitsyn when reshaping Russia. But we do believe that Solzhenitsyn had an understanding of Russia that towered over most of his contemporaries. And we believe that the traditional Russia that Solzhenitsyn celebrated is emerging, more from its own force than by political decisions.

Solzhenitsyn served Western purposes when he undermined the Soviet state. But that was not his purpose. His purpose was to destroy the Soviet state so that his vision of Russia could re-emerge. When his interests and the West’s coincided, he won the Nobel Prize. When they diverged, he became a joke. But Solzhenitsyn never really cared what Americans or the French thought of him and his ideas. He wasn’t speaking to them and had no interest or hope of remaking them. Solzhenitsyn was totally alien to American culture. He was speaking to Russia and the vision he had was a resurrection of Mother Russia, if not with the czar, then certainly with the church and state. That did not mean liberalism; Mother Russia was dramatically oppressive. But it was neither a country of mass murder nor of vulgar materialism.

It must also be remembered that when Solzhenitsyn spoke of Russia, he meant imperial Russia at its height, and imperial Russia’s borders at its height looked more like the Soviet Union than they looked like Russia today. “August 1914” is a book that addresses geopolitics. Russian greatness did not have to express itself via empire, but logically it should — something to which Solzhenitsyn would not have objected.

Solzhenitsyn could not teach Americans, whose intellectual genes were incompatible with his. But it is hard to think of anyone who spoke to the Russian soul as deeply as he did. He first ripped Russia apart with his indictment. He was later ignored by a Russia out of control under former President Boris Yeltsin. But today’s Russia is very slowly moving in the direction that Solzhenitsyn wanted. And that could make Russia extraordinarily powerful. Imagine a Soviet Union not ruled by thugs and incompetents. Imagine Russia ruled by people resembling Solzhenitsyn’s vision of a decent man.

Solzhenitsyn was far more prophetic about the future of the Soviet Union than almost all of the Ph.D.s in Russian studies. Entertain the possibility that the rest of Solzhenitsyn’s vision will come to pass. It is an idea that ought to cause the world to be very thoughtful.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com

To all the Russophobes in the U.S. (2)

2008-09-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Sergey Brin (right), born in Moscow, in the family of mathematicians, one of the founders of Google.

Download new Google Chrome Internet browser here - it is super-fast and really cool!

Igor Sikorsky, born in Russian Empire (currently Ukraine), invented the helicopter.

Vladimir Zworykin, born in Russia, one of the inventors of the television.

The "friend" of the U.S. (2)

2008-09-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

This study, which came out in 2006, is disliked equally nowadays by the neo-cons and the liberals, because it does not portray Mr. Saakashvili in a favorable light. You can read it at the provided link or here below.

I think this study is right on and was illustrated by numerous appearances of Saakashvili on the U.S. television during last month's conflict in South Ossetia.

Mikhail Saakashvili : A Psychological Study of the Character

IAbstract] The present study examines psychological characteristics of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, concludes trom the analysis of available data that he has certain psychiatric disturbances and makes a diagnosis. The study offers also practical advice, which should be followed while dealing with President Saakashvili.

In view of its sensitivity the study is for limited distribution only.

We wish to acknowledge the contribution to the study made by:

Tonsherg Psychiatric. Centre, Orsnessale, Norway;
Naticnal Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway;
Department of Psychiatry, Kuopio University Hospital, Finland;
Centre for Nervous Deceases, Christian Atbrecht University, Kiel, Germany;
Department of Psychiatry, University of Geneva, Switzerland;
Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, University of Vienna Medical School, Austria;
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

1. Anamnesis and family history
Information about Saakashvili's childhood and adolescence is insufficient. Raised in a single-parentfamilyenvironmenthe grew much attached to his mother. Early in his life due to a deep emotional trauma he became very negative and aggressive towards his biological father.

His relationship with his stepfather later in his life was also tense and bitter. He also had difficulties in understanding and establishing relations with other people of his age and was often treated as an outcast and a "loner". This situation was partially corrected and his social skills improved when in high school he joined a school theatre group and took part in some of its theatrical productions.

At the same time, together with some other classmates, he became actively involved in an amateur film production, including porno films. When this incident finally became public and a scandal broke at school he had to leave his homctown and went to Kiev. During the following period he immersed himself into a lifestyle of destructive behaviour,parties and sex. His apartment at that time was often offered to his fellow students and friends as a place for intimate encounters and he used this as a way to gain popularity and establish his place in the "in crowd".

By the end of his freshman year he got involved in yet another confrontation with the
establishment and was expelled from Komsomol organization. In order to calm things down he volunteered in the Army and spent two years in service.

2. Behavioural patterns
The overall partem of Saakashvili's social behaviour is defined by persistent conflict existing between this exteriorized behaviour and his internal emotional component. While demonstrating and often exaggerating his sincerity, expressiveness and communication skills on the outside, he presents all the signs of internal tension,nervousness,suspicion and emotional vulnerability. The nonverbal component of his behaviour is especially representative and informative in this respect. While his facial expression is usually lively and matches the behavioural context, his gesticulation (his hand movements tend to be "chopping-like" with palms being constantly spastic and this "closed-in" pattern doesn't change during the whole
period of verbal communication, even when the communication environment is in its most positive and favourable phase), body posture and rigid body language are all out of context.

On the scale of motivational factors his fixation on pride and self-esteem and his egocentrism prevail over altruistic tendencies and public interests that he pretends to demonstrate in public. This detemUnes his inability to adequately control his internal outbursts of resentment when he feels that he is not being appreciated enough. These outbursts may happen even when he consciously and sincereJy intends to express his loyalty and readiness to cooperate with the counterpart. Saakashvi1i has demonstrated that he finds it difficult to organize his thoughts and express himself when he is being confronted with unexpected, complicated and personally unpleasant issues. Though in general be has a fairly good level of verbal skills, under the above circumstances he tends to get confused and resorts to obviously meaningless, lengthy and empty wording in order to avoid a clear-defined and down to business answer and thus intends to overwhelm his counterpart. A situation when during one of his public appearances he was asked about his income can be a good illustration of such a pattern of behaviour.

Extreme egocentricity of Saakashvili's personality often becomes an obstacle for himself when a situation is cal1ing for a fresh and original ideas and spontaneous reactions. He intuitively recognizes this constraint and tries to mask his egocentrism by acting out in a verbose and extremely eloquent manner, expecting to produce a "spell- like", mesmerizing effect on his opponents.

Saakashvili's behaviour consistently demonstrates that his emotionaJ response and his ability to express signs of excitement and genuine interest primarily occur when his persona, his exceptionality and significance become the centre topic of the discussion. He looked exited and radiant, if not happy, when he was once posing in front of his car, showing bullet holes in the windshield. To him the fact that he was a "target" of an assassination attempt had put him in line with other world leaders and dignitaries. His exaggerated, theatrical and openly deliberate
personal style nevertheless lacks spontaneity, easiness and showmanship, so typica1for other hysteroid types.

3. Psychological aspect
3.1. Intellectual component. IQ level is above average with active type of reasoning, good level of abstract and analytical capabilities and ideation. Subject's ideation activity on one hand combines impulsiveness, tendency to follow emotional logic and initial internal impulse and on the other hand above average ideation rigidity with tendency to constantly conceptualize, create static, emotionally saturated ideas and groups of ideas, capable of asserting the importance and exclusivity of his own personality. Due to the extreme rigidity of these ideas Saakashvili is open only to the information that agrees with his conceptual structure and he totally excludes the rest that exists outside this scope. Taken to the extreme, this tendency may become transformed into megalomania, obsessive or maniacal syndrome characterized by a personal conviction of being destined to be the "chosen one".

Though his general education level is above average and his ability to form channels of verbal communicationis swift, smooth and even with a hint of artistry, his reasoning lacks depth, originality and independence. Pretending to be special, creative and exclusive his reasoning nevertheless is rather ordinary, predictable and often based on common knowledge and plagiarism. Finding himself in an unexpected situation or being confronted with unanticipated questions he finds it difficu]t to come up with the right answer and in order to save his face he becomes verbose,sidetracks and eventually switches to other topics.

3.2. Motivational component. Subject's general level of activity is noticeably elevated. Primary motivational factors include ambition, vanity, superiority, extreme competitiveness and dominance. We may assume that Saakashvi1i's low self-esteem and complex of inferiority, both formed early in the childhood but suppressed at present, have determined his strong urge for power. These dominant internal factors have transformed through hyper compensatory mechanism of defence into partial and at times complete loss of sense of reality, adequate behavioural response and capacity to perceive contextual reality.

His overwhelming egocentric desire for se1f-affirmation and strong conviction in personal superiority put him into a position when his political career becomes only an instrument in his quest to gain socia1 recognition that he has been denied for so long. He is so overwhelmed with this internal passion for proving himself at all times that he is not capable to accept the civic values of the society that once rejected him. We may only expect that this win lead him into more conflicts with this society in the future. It is important to recognize that in his pursuit for
power he may easily loose the sense of danger and natural fear of consequences of his own decisions and this makes him capable of provoking serious conflicts, including political and military.

3.3. Emotional component. Emotional excitation level is above average. His personality tends to present stab1e signs of hyperactivity, elevated 1evels of emotional status, excessive self esteem and extremely high expectations. He is very active, vigorous and resourceful in achieving his personal goals. At the same time, being extremely self-centred,he can be easily heart, tends to hold a grudge and be very emotional about it, even to the point of seeking revenge. His exterior emotional manifestations are expressive, intense and at time theatrical. He easily develops internal tension and becomes defensive, negative and jealous towards people,
who he recognize as surpassing him in something.

4. Diagnosis
Expansive type of paranoid dysfunction (according to ICD-10) combined with narcissist type of hysteroid personal1ty.

Paranoid aspect is translated into excessive intellectual and emotional rigidity, tendency to "getting stuck" and form fixations on certain ideas and concepts. In case of Saakashvili this may have been caused by extremely high emotional status of his past experiences carrying a special significance for him.

Saakashvili's personality is characterized by typical for paranoid types excessive self-esteem, hypertrophied sense of pride combined with excessive sensitivity towards failure and negative social response. He attaches special importance to everything that is related to his own personality and his personal interests. At the same time anything existing outside this "personal circle" becomes exc1uded from the domain of his active attention. Saakashvi1i presents persistent tendency to put himself in opposition with the rest of the society and perceive the world around him as a hostile environment. As an obvious response he expresses this perception in a form of extreme vigilance and distrust towards others.

He is incapable to act based on idealistic motives and rejects this ability in others. He is prone to suspect others of being unfair, insolent, and envious, with intentions to humiliate, insult, entrap and dishonour him. Above described personality disorders could be observed in Saakashvili since very early in his adolescence and throughout his adult life.

Saakashvili's tendency to create super ideas is especially typical for paranoid dysfunctions. Super ideas totally enslave the entire personality and completely determine its behavioural patterns. One of such super ideas that keep Saakashvili obsessed at the moment is his pursuit for powerand self-promotion.

A distinctive feature of Saakashvili as of an expansive paranoid type is his vigour, dynamism, at times even restlessness and disregard for rest and fatigue.

Saakashvili's narcissism combined with hysteroid traits determines his pathological ambition, arrogance, sense of superiority and exuberantly high opinion about himself. He is irrefutably convinced in his own righteousness and personal importance, is intolerant towards any form of criticism and tends to exaggerate his personal accomplishments. His ability to work effectively goes alongside with desire for public attention and admiration. His decision to choose politics as a profession as a very natural choice for him, since he wouldn't have got himself involved in any other field that hadn't had promised him a speedy gratification in a form of fame and public recognition. As most of narcissists he lacks empathy, is indifferent towards other people's needs and feelings and "perceives the rest of humanity as faceless applauding crowd".

5.Recommendations
Taking into consideration the combination of paranoid dysfunction with hysteroid symptoms that define Saakashviii as a person, we offer the following recommendations with the purpose of creating an atmosphere of personal trust and openness which may open a window of opportunity for lowering his self-control and predispose him to act in an open and sincere manner:

It is advisable that the counterpart (interlocutor) should demonstrate an obviously positive intention in a form of expressing sincere interest in Saakashvili's personality and demonstrating appreciation and "proper" recognition.

Contrast approach: initial phase should include a demonstration of interest in everything concerning Saakashvili's personality, his merits, praise his real and nonexistent accomplishments and then introduce a comment putting this statement under a shroud of doubt. We expect that under the circumstances Saakashvili may try to substantiate his "reputation" and talk more than it was initially intended.

Tt is possible to motivate Saakashvili to repeat his discourse about a situation of certain importance and demonstrate a degree of scepticism. Under this sort of pressure hysteroid types tend to exaggerate the fictional component and add new details in order to make it al1 look more credible. Often these additional details are contradictory and thus add new semantic shades to the whole narration about the same account. This may open an additional ground to add questions, single out contradictions and request clarifications.

It is very probable that Saakashvili has low tolerance towards information deprivation, anticipation, inactivity and loss of interest towards himself. Being forced to operate in such a context he may initiate a communication process, may develop a desire to "speak himself out" and attract attention all for the single purpose of maintaining the status of the focal point of the public interest. Anyone potentially capable to offer him such an opportunity may become a welcome partner for Saakashvili.

Being the type of a personality that exists with the conviction that "he knows best" and is ready for competition at any time, he tends to reject any action that he perceives as contradictory to his publicly expressed views about a particular situation. In order to motivate him to act in a preferred way he should be convinced that in this particular situation he is in charge of setting goals and finding ways to accomplish them.

5.1. Be aware of:
Under no circumstance use imperative tone or give him a reason to believe that he is
being humiliated or disrespected and even more so if it is done in public. In case that he is stuck in controversies it is advisable to allow him to find his way out in order to save his face and even, if it is needed, offer him a suitable and honourable rout of escape.

At the same time it is advisable not to give in all the time. His personality type
respects power and any indisputable authority generates a sense of respect in him and desire to be part of this force and use it for his own benefit.

Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world

2008-09-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

Click here to read the full article by Seumas Milne, The Guardian, August 28, 2008

It is really hard to take anything away from this article, so I highlighted the passages to which Russian people can relate the most.

"If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.

That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.

But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states", are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance.

Now, pumped up with petrodollars, Russia has called a halt to this relentless expansion and demonstrated that the US writ doesn't run in every backyard. And although it has been a regional, not a global, challenge, this object lesson in the new limits of American power has already been absorbed from central Asia to Latin America.

In Georgia itself, both Medvedev's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence and Russia's destruction of Georgian military capacity have been designed to leave no room for doubt that the issue of the enclaves' reintegration has been closed. There are certainly dangers for Russia's own territorial integrity in legitimising breakaway states. But the move will have little practical impact and is presumably partly intended to create bargaining chips for future negotiations.

Miliband's attempt in Ukraine, meanwhile, to deny the obvious parallels with the US-orchestrated recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year rang particularly hollow, as did his denunciation of invasions of sovereign states and double standards. Both the west and Russia have abused the charge of "genocide" to try and give themselves legal cover, but Russia is surely on stronger ground over South Ossetia - where its own internationally recognised peacekeepers were directly attacked by the Georgian army - than Nato was in Kosovo in 1999, where most ethnic cleansing took place after the US-led assault began.

There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."

Why that should be so isn't hard to understand. It's not only that the US and its camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival emerged, the US would need to "account for the interests of advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership". But when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a multipolar world.

Of course, that new multipolarity can easily be overstated. Russia is a regional power and there is no imminent prospect of a serious global challenger to the US, which will remain overwhelmingly the most powerful state in the world for years to come. It can also exacerbate the risk of conflict. But only the most solipsistic western mindset can fail to grasp the necessity of a counterbalance in international relations that can restrict the freedom of any one power to impose its will on other countries unilaterally.

One western response, championed by the Times this week, is to damn this growing challenge to US domination on the grounds that it is led by autocratic states in the shape of Russia and China. In reality, western alarm clearly has very little to do with democracy. When Russia collapsed into the US orbit under Boris Yeltsin, his bombardment of the Russian parliament and shamelessly rigged elections were treated with the greatest western understanding.

The real gripe is not with these states' lack of accountability - Russian public opinion is in any case overwhelmingly supportive of its government's actions in Georgia - but their strategic challenge and economic rivalry. For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a rules-based system of international relations. In the circumstances, that might come to seem quite appealing to whoever is elected US president."

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

To all the Russophobes in the U.S.

2008-09-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Nastia Liukin, born in Moscow, Russia, the daughter of two former Soviet champion gymnasts, won five medals for the United States at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, including gold in the all-around competition.

Lenny Krayzelburg, born in Odessa, Soviet Union (now Ukraine), in the family of Russian Jews, won three gold medals for the United States at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Sasha Cohen, born in Los Angeles to a Russian-Jewish mother and an American father, won silver for the United States at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino.

Peter Tchernyshev, born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Naomi Lang, the five-time U.S. national ice dance champions and 2002 Olympic team members.

Alexander Artemev, born in Minsk, Soviet Union (now Belarus), to Russian parents, a member of the bronze medal winning U.S. team at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the only member of the American men's team to win a medal at the 2006 World Championships, a bronze on the pommel horse.

Punch Sucker-shvili or Kiss Putin

2008-09-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Click on either of the images below to make Mama Bear happy:
(Flash 8 or higher required)
And yes, it is meant to tease and taunt you, Russophobes, while allowing the Russians let their frustration out in a fun way.

Tony Blankley's Logical Fallacy

2008-08-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

Tony Blankley writes on Townhall.com:

"Georgia has cozied up to Uncle Sam as part of a nearly two-decades-long effort by the United States to bring the former non-Russian Soviet republics and formerly captive eastern European nations into the American-led sphere of influence - and out from under Russia's historic suzerainty over the lands just beyond its border.

America's aggressive diplomacy in this regard was heightened recently when - at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, this year - it pressed for Georgia's and Ukraine's memberships to the alliance. Moreover, America and Britain have been providing military assistance to the Georgians in the form of arms and training."

"Did our government assume that we could continue to bait the Russian bear in his cave and not eventually get his claw thrashed against our face?"

"Clinton, after all, went to war, bombing civilian Serbian cities for two months against Russia's little Slavic brother. And the current President Bush overplayed his weak hand in Bucharest when he called for Georgia's and Ukraine's admissions into NATO (and got turned down even by our NATO allies)."

However, after all this Blankley ends up saying that the US needs to build up its military strength to "influence Moscow (and other restless agressors)". I see great unfairness and logical fallacy in this conclusion.

What the US should have done is not have held on to the outrageously unfair Jackson-Vanik Amendment for so many years, after Russia stepped on the way to democracy. It should not have brought a military organization that clearly sees Russia as the heir of the Soviet Union all the way to the Russian borders, in violation of its promise. It should not have, as Tony Blankley correctly describes, bombed and killed Christian Serbian civilians. It should have not advocated for Georgia's acceptance to WTO ahead of Russia, to guarantee Georgia's veto of Russia's acceptance to this organization. It should not have lied to Russia's face that it considers Russia "friend", while treating it like enemy. One can train a bear ride a bicycle and dance, if one treats it right. Russians like me were very excited about and hoped for the new friendship with the US in the late 80s - early 90s. Nowadays, Putin's popularity in Russia is enormous because the Russian people see how unfair the US is to Russia.

The Cold War was over, but it was revived by the US. I wish, Tony, reasonable people like you were honest enough to say it.

Lanny Davis: Are we all Georgians? Not so fast

2008-08-25T20:22:00.000-07:00

Click here for Lanny Davis' take on the South Ossetian conflict. Decent people are decent people, no matter whether they are on the left or on the right. It is decent to tell the truth, which, in the words of Lanny Davis in an article written for Washington Times, is this:

"• Georgia, not Russia, initiated the first military actions on Aug. 7 by sending (according to the Wall Street Journal ) "much of its army up to the area of Tskhinvali, the capital of its pro-Russian South Ossetian province," including tanks, armored personnel carriers, howitzers and other equipment.

• The State Department's specialist on Georgia, Matthew J. Bryza (again according to the Journal) and many other officials warned Mr. Saakashvili many times over a period of months against military action that might provoke the Russians. But Mr. Saakashvili ignored the advice and "undeterred ... ordered troops to take Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital, and to knock out the bridge."

• South Ossetians speak a different language from Georgians, have a different culture, have a government headed by a Russian, historically have been close to Russia and have sought separation from Georgia - similar to another "separatist" region of Georgia, Abkhazia.

• When the U.S. last spring recognized Kosovo's secession from Serbia, despite Kosovo having been long recognized as part of Serbia and over the strong objections of Serbia and Russia, Serbia's historic ally - Russian President Vladimir Putin - warned way back then that "Russia will feel entitled to do the same with South Ossetia and Georgia's other breakaway enclave, Abkhazia," according to the New York Times."

"The friend" of the U.S.

2008-08-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

YouTube shows Sookashvili in all his beauty:

Georgia Started the War - Pat Buchanan

2008-08-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

See Pat Buchanan's interview given to Russia Today:

And None Dare Call It Treason

2008-08-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

By Patrick J. Buchanan

See original article at Antiwar.com

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 – pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality – namely, that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the Soviet Union broke apart.

Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9/11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

'We Are All Georgians'? Not So Fast.

2008-08-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

By Michael Dobbs (Washington Post)
See the original article here.

It didn't take long for the "Putin is Hitler" analogies to start following the eruption of the ugly little war between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia. Neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia with the Nazi grab of the Sudetenland in 1938. President Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said that the Russian leader was following a course "horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s."

Others invoked the infamous Brezhnev doctrine, under which Soviet leaders claimed the right to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe in order to prop up their crumbling imperium. "We've seen this movie before, in Prague and Budapest," said John McCain, referring to the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956. According to the Republican presidential candidate,"today we are all Georgians."

Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia have little in common with either Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. They are better understood against the backdrop of the complica ted ethnic politics of the Caucasus, a part of the world where historical grudges run deep and oppressed can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.

Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in the shadow of the mountains that rise along Russia's southern border. I was there in March 1991, shortly after the city was occupied by Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia's first acts as Georgian president was to cancel the political autonomy that the Stalinist constitution had granted the republic's 90,000-strong Ossetian minority.

After negotiating safe passage with Soviet interior ministry troops who had stationed themselves between the Georgians and the Ossetians, I discovered that the town had been ransacked by Gamsakhurdia's militia. The Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian poet and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who had fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.

It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians viewed Georgians in much the same way that Georgians view Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking away their independence. "We are much more worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian imperialism," an Ossetian leader, Gerasim Khugaev, told me then. "It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time."

When it comes to apportioning blame for the latest flare-up in the Caucasus, there's plenty to go around. The Russians were clearly itching for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic and provocative. The United States may have stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to believe that he enjoyed American protection, when the West's ability to impose its will in this part of the world is actually quite limited.

Let us examine the role played by the three main parties.

Georgia. Saakashvili's image in the West, and particularly in the United States, is that of the great "democrat," the leader of the "Rose Revolution" who spearheaded a popular uprising against former American favorite Eduard Shevardnadze in November 2003. It is true that he has won two reasonably free elections, but he has also displayed some autocratic tendencies: He sent riot police to crush an opposition protest in Tbilisi last November and shuttered an opposition television station.

While the United States views Saakashvili as a pro-Western modernizer, a large part of his political appeal in Georgia has stemmed from his promise to reunify Georgia by bringing the secessionist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under central control. He has presented himself as the successor to the medieval Georgian king David the Builder and promised that the country will regain its lost territories by the time he leaves office, by one means or another. American commentators tend to overlook the fact that Georgian democracy is inextricably intertwined with Georgian nationalism.

The restoration of Georgia's traditional borders is an understandable goal for a Georgian leader, but it is a much lower priority for the West, particularly if it involves armed conflict with Russia. Based on their previous experience with Georgian rule, Ossetians and Abkhazians have perfectly valid reasons to oppose reunification with Georgia, even if it means throwing in their lot with the Russians.

It is unclear how the simmering tensions between Georgia and South Ossetia came to the boil this month. The Georgians say that they were provoked by the shelling of Georgian villages from Ossetian-controlled territory. While this may well be the case, the Georgian response was disproportionate. On the night of Aug. 7 and into Aug. 8, Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against Tskhinvali and sent an armored column to occupy the town. He apparently hoped that Western support would protect Georgia from major Russian retaliation, even though Russian "peacekeepers" were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault.

It was a huge miscalculation. Russian Prime minister Vladimir Putin (and let there be no doubt that he is calling the shots in Moscow despite having handed over the presidency to his protege, Dmitri Medvedev) now had the ideal pretext for settling scores with the uppity Georgians. Rather than simply restoring the status quo ante, Russian troops moved into Georgia proper, cutting the main east-west highway at Gori and attacking various military bases.

Saakashvili's decision to gamble everything on a lightning grab for Tskhinvali brings to mind the comment of the 19th-century French statesman Talleyrand: "It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake."

Russia. Putin and Medvedev have defended their incursion into Georgia as motivated by a desire to stop the "genocide" of Ossetians by Georgians. It is difficult to take their moral outrage very seriously. There is a striking contrast between Russian support for the right of Ossetian self-determination in Georgia and the brutal suppression of Chechens who were trying to exercise that very same right within the boundaries of Russia.

Playing one ethnic group against another in the Caucasus has been standard Russian policy ever since czarist times. It is the ideal wedge issue for the Kremlin, particularly in the case of a state such as Georgia, which is made up of several different nationalities. It would be virtually impossible for South Ossetia to survive as an autonomous entity without Russian support. Putin's government has issued passports to Ossetians and secured the appointment of Russians to key positions in Tskhinvali.

The Russian incursion into Georgia proper has been even more "disproportionate" -- in President Bush's phrase -- than the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali. The Russians have made no secret of their wish to replace Saakashvili with a more compliant leader. Russian military targets included the Black Sea port of Poti -- more than 100 miles from South Ossetia.

The real goal of Kremlin strategy is to reassert Russian influence in a part of the world that has been regarded, by czars and commissars alike, as Russia's backyard. Russian leaders bitterly resented the eastward expansion of NATO to include Poland and the Baltic states -- with Ukraine and Georgia next on the list -- but were unable to do very much about it as long as America was strong and Russia was weak. Now the tables are turning for the first time since the collapse of communism in 1991, and Putin is seizing the moment.

If Putin is smart, he will refrain from occupying Georgia proper, a step that would further alarm the West and unite Georgians against Russia. A better tactic would be to wait for Georgians themselves to turn against Saakashvili. The precedent here is what happened to Gamsakhurdia, who was overthrown in January 1992 by the same militia forces he had sent into South Ossetia a year earlier.

The United States. The Bush administration has been sending mixed messages to its Georgian friends. U.S. officials insist that they did not give the green light to Saakashvili for his attack on South Ossetia. At the same time, however, the United States has championed NATO membership for Georgia, sent military advisers to bolster the Georgian army and demanded the restoration of Georgian territorial integrity. American support might well have emboldened Saakashvili as he was considering how to respond to the "provocations" from South Ossetia.

Now the United States has ended up in a situation in the Caucasus where the Georgian tail is wagging the NATO dog. We were unable to control Saakashvili or to lend him effective assistance when his country was invaded. One lesson is that we need to be very careful in extending NATO membership, or even the promise of membership, to countries that we have neither the will nor the ability to defend.

In the meantime, American leaders have paid little attention to Russian diplomatic concerns, both inside the former borders of the Soviet Union and farther abroad. The Bush administration unilaterally abrogated the 1972 anti-missile defense treaty and ignored Putin when he objected to Kosovo independence on the grounds that it would set a dangerous precedent. It is difficult to explain why Kosovo should have the right to unilaterally declare its independence from Serbia, while the same right should be denied to places such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The bottom line is that the United States is overextended militarily, diplomatically and economically. Even hawks such as Vice President Cheney, who have been vociferously denouncing Putin's actions in Georgia, have no stomach for a military conflict with Moscow. The United States is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and needs Russian support in the coming trial of strength with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

Instead of speaking softly and wielding a big stick, as Teddy Roosevelt recommended, the American policeman has been loudly lecturing the rest of the world while waving an increasingly unimpressive baton. The events of the past few days serve as a reminder that our ideological ambitions have greatly exceeded our military reach, particularly in areas such as the Caucasus, which is of only peripheral importance to the United States but of vital interest to Russia.

dobbsm@washpost.com

Michael Dobbs covered the collapse of the Soviet Union for The Washington Post. His latest book is "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War."

Not-a-Czar Medvedev

2008-08-16T02:29:00.000-07:00

I borrowed this artfully created image from LiveJournal.

Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov was too weak to fight WWI and to prevent the two Revolutions of 1917. As a result, he was murdered, along with his wife and children, by the Bolsheviks, and the country suffered for many years to come. President Medvedev does look like Czar Nicholas II, but most people in Russia expect him to have the strength and decisiveness of President Putin.

The US media have been presenting Dmitry Medvedev as another weak political figure, a puppet in the hands of the inconvenient for the West and stubborn Putin. Yes, he may not have the colorfully abrasive personality of Putin, which made many Russians secretly (and openly) proud. Yes, he is more of a technocrat, and his speeches may seem boring. However, he will creep up on the West, like the unknown Putin did, after he was appointed to presidency by Yeltsin. The West will not know what hit it.

"Medved" means "bear" in Russian. The proverbial Russian Bear will be strong and do what he thinks he needs to do in the interests of his country.

If we listen to him, we will notice that his values and priorities are not those of an autocratic leader. Medvedev, who was twenty years old, when perestroika began, formed intellectually and politically during the new times.

One of his very first presidential decrees, issued during the first several days in office, was "On Urgent Measures to Eliminate Administrative Restrictions on Business". This decree required that lawmakers work on provisions of law to increase the rights of small and medium-size businesses, reduce planned state audits of businesses to no more than once in three years, and to forbid unplanned state audits of businesses, unless caused by necessity to save lives or health of people, and only with a prosecutorial authorization. Text of the Decree dated May 15, 2008 (in Russian)

It is short-sided and willfully ignorant of the United States and the European Union to insist on equating Russia to the old USSR. Most Russians think that the US and EU are on the wrong side in the South Ossetian conflict. They are insulted by Condoleezza Rice comparing their country's response to Georgia's bombings of South Ossetia to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union.

Russia is not USSR. It is taking its own, albeit bumpy, road to democracy - not the one that the West wants it to take, but it will get there. It took Moses forty years to walk his people out of slavery; so Russia is only half-way through.

Medvedev Quotes

From the interview given to Reuters on June 23, 2008; from the website of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

"Regarding our foreign policy, it is shaped not by the amount of criticism directed at us, but by our own values and objectives. In this sense, it continues the foreign policy line the Russian Federation has painstakingly developed over these last two decades."

"The main objective of our foreign policy is to defend Russia’s national interests at every level and in every area of international cooperation based on pragmatic considerations and what we consider to be our defining values, namely freedom, democracy and protection of private property".

"Most economists in the Soviet Union thought the state should control everything. This was the distinguishing feature of the command economy. The opposite construction is also possible, when practically all companies are in private hands and the state is almost absent from business. And then there are models in which the state and private business are both present in the economy. The extent of state participation in the economy should be decided based on each specific moment. I think that at the moment there are no grounds for talking about increasing the state’s presence in the economy. The state has no interest in this. On the contrary, we are continuing the process of privatising assets that began more than a decade ago. A number of big companies, above all energy companies and some defence companies have returned to state hands. We consider this important for ensuring our strategic economic interests over the coming years. But there are no plans to further increase the state’s presence in the economy. On the contrary, we will take steps to reduce the state’s presence in economy."

"Corruption is a challenge to our system and a threat to our national security. It undermines citizens’ confidence in the state’s ability to maintain order and protect people from all kinds of criminal levies and from having to pay money for services they did not order."

From the interview given to Financial Times on March 24, 2008:

"We need to assert the priority of laws over legal documents and over decisions that are made by the executive power and individual acts."

"we have to make all the necessary efforts to make sure that the courts in Russia are independent and objective and act on the basis of existing procedural legislation."

"the only way that Russia can count on having the supremacy of the law is in the situation when the powers-that-be respect the independence of the courts and of judges."

"Our democracy is very young. It's less than two decades old. It was the case that before this there was no democracy in Russia, not in tsarist times and not in Soviet times. We should take this into account in our everyday democratic practice. On the other hand, there is another extreme when analysts - foreign and some Russian ones - claim that Russia is not capable of democracy; that this is not its path of development, and that no universal human values can work in Russia. Russia is a European country and Russia is absolutely capable of developing together with other states that have chosen this democratic path of development...Russia has every opportunity to build a developed democratic society and a full-fledged democratic state. "

Gorbachev: Georgia started conflict in S. Ossetia (CNN)

2008-08-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- Georgian leaders may be blaming Russia for the conflict raging in South Ossetia, but former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said Thursday "there is no doubt" that Georgia provoked the clash.

Mikhail Gorbachev told CNN's Larry King that Russia called extra troops into Georgia to stem violence.

Gorbachev told CNN's Larry King that Russia moved additional forces into South Ossetia in response to "devastation" in the South Ossetia city of Tskhinvali.

"This was the use of sophisticated weapons against a small town, against a sleeping people. This was a barbaric assault," said Gorbachev, the last president of the former Soviet Union.

But Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who also appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" Thursday, said he was "profoundly shocked" that Mikhail Gorbachev would use a television appearance "for basically vindicating lies and deceptions."

[Mama Bear says: "Suckashvili has used media for a week for his lies and deceptions - enough of that."]

Last week, Georgia said it launched an operation into South Ossetia after a cease-fire was broken with artillery fire from Russian separatists that killed 10 people including civilians and peacekeepers. It accused Russia, which also has peacekeepers in the region, of backing the separatists.

Hours later, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that Russian authorities said 10 Russian peacekeepers had been killed and 30 wounded in an attack by Georgians.

"Western television didn't show what happened in Tskhinvali," Gorbachev said. "Only now they're beginning to show some pictures of the destruction. So this looks to me like it was a well-prepared project. And with any outcome, they wanted to put the blame on Russia."

He called Georgia's claims that Russia is attempting to dismantle its democracy "all lies from beginning to end."

In response, Saakashvili expressed disappointment with the sentiments from Gorbachev, who he said he once respected.

[Mama Bear never respected Suckashvili. She will eat him if she can find him.]

"This is the man, Mr. Gorbachev, who helped to, you know, bring down KGB kingdom. And he is the one who is, you know, justifying what the KGB people are doing right now in my country," Saakashvili said.

"Shame on him. Shame on you, Mr. Gorbachev, for perpetuating the very regime you helped to defeat and you fought against as the head of the Soviet Union."

Gorbachev also said the United States is jeopardizing its fragile relationship with Russia by backing Georgia.

"There is a chance for our two countries to develop a new agenda for cooperation so as to promote both U.S. and Russia interests, and the interests of other countries, and the interests of stability, particularly in the hotspots in different continents," said Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Price in 1990.

Just an Observation

2008-08-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

It seems that for us, Americans, it is important for President to have great hair. For us, Russians, hair is not that important. (Yep, I did mean to say "us" in both cases.) Pretty much every other Soviet, and later Russian, leader was somewhat bald. Russians think that great hair is for sissies, and baldness is a sign of virility. Americans think that they are too civilized to have bad hair.

I do think that Mitt Romney looks pretty cool, but, personally for me Sean Connery is much sexier.

Early Lessons from S Ossetia Conflict

2008-08-13T23:48:00.000-07:00

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

[Mama Bear says: "I do not agree with everything that Paul Reynolds says, but some of it is pretty great. Especially the part about not punching the bear."]

Although the fighting over South Ossetia is not over, and fighting for another Georgian enclave, Abkhazia, looks like developing, it is perhaps not too early to learn some tentative lessons from the crisis.

1. Do not punch a bear on the nose unless it is tied down.

Did President Saakashvili miscalculate?

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili must have thought that Russia would not react strongly when he sent his forces in on the eve of the Olympic games to regain control of a territory he had insisted must remain part of Georgia, albeit with some form of autonomy.

Yet Russia was always likely to respond. It already had forces there, leading the peacekeeping force agreed back in the easier days of 1992 between President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and President Edward Shevardnadze of Georgia, himself the former Soviet foreign minister who helped bring the Cold War to an end.

Russia has been supporting the separatists in South Ossetia and handed out Russian passports to the population, thereby enabling it to claim that it was defending its own citizens.

The result of what many see as his miscalculation is that President Saakashvili might well lose any hope of reasserting Georgian power in the enclave.

2. Russia is in a determined mood, to say the least.

Russia, as it has so often done in the past, sees itself being encircled.

In a revealing interview with former BBC Moscow correspondent Tim Whewell earlier this year, an adviser to the then President Vladimir Putin, Gleb Pavlosky, said that the Russian leadership had concluded after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine that "this is what we faced in Moscow, that they would try to export this to us, that we should prepare for this situation and very quickly strengthen our political system..."

What applied after Ukraine moved towards the West also applied as Georgia did the same. Moscow wanted to prevent any such internal revolution in Russia itself and therefore saw Ukraine and Georgia as hostile influences.

It is not clear how far Russia wants to push this, but given that it says it wants to re-establish order in South Ossetia, that probably means a permanent presence, with no return to a Georgian government role. Diplomats think it unlikely that Russia will invade Georgia 'proper'.

3. Remember Kosovo.

Russia was mightily displeased when the West supported the separation of Kosovo from Serbia and warned of consequences. This might be one of them. Of course, Russia has not argued in this crisis that it is simply doing what the West did in Kosovo - that would undermine its own argument that states should not be broken up without agreement. But everyone knows that underneath, Kosovo is not far from its mind.

4. Georgia is unlikely to join Nato anytime soon.

Georgia and Ukraine were denied membership of Nato in April, although they were allowed to develop an action plan that could lead to membership one day.

The Americans argued for both countries to be accepted, but the Germans and others countered that the region was too unstable for these countries to join at the moment and that in particular Georgia, a state with a border dispute, should not be given formal Nato support.

5. Vladmir Putin is still in charge.

It was Mr Putin, prime minister not president these days, who went to Beijing for the Olympic opening ceremony and who then rushed to the crisis region to take control of the Russian response. His language was uncompromising - Russia was right to intervene, he stated.

6. Do not allow a cuckoo to police the nest.

Mr Shevardnadze's decision in 1992 to allow Russia into South Ossetia as part of the peacekeeping force enabled a later and very different Russian government from the one led by Boris Yeltsin to gradually extend its influence and control. It was not hard for Russia to justify its intervention. It simply stated that its citizens were not only at risk but under attack.

7. The West still does not know how to deal with Russia.

Some of the old Cold War arguments are resurfacing, with no consensus about what to do. There are the neo-conservatives, led by US Vice-President Dick Cheney (and supported by Republican presidential candidate John McCain) who see Georgia (and Ukraine) as flag bearers for freedom which must be supported. In due course, they argue, Russia will be forced to change, just as the old Soviet Union was.

Against that is the argument, expressed to the BBC for example on Sunday by the former British Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, that it is "absurd" to treat Russia like the Soviet Union and that Georgia made a miscalculation in South Ossetia for which it is now paying.

8. Are borders in Europe to be sacrosanct for ever?

It has been one of the rules of post-war Europe - borders cannot be changed except by agreement, as say in Czechoslovakia. Perhaps this rule has been applied too inflexibly. Yet governments like that of Georgia are reluctant to give up any territory, even when the local population is so clearly hostile and might be in that state simply as a result of some past arbitrary decision. It was the Soviet Union that created a semi-autonomous region of South Ossetia in Georgia in 1922. Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Will this lead to trouble one day?

9. August is good month in which to reflect on alliances.

In August 1914, the First World War broke out following the assassination in June of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It did so because alliances had been formed in Europe which came into play inexorably. Russia supported Serbia, Germany supported Austria, France supported Russia and Britain came in when Belgium was invaded.

Alliances must not be entered into lightly or unadvisedly. If Georgia had been in Nato, what would have happened?

Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power (www.stratfor.com)

2008-08-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

By George Friedman

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power

Stratfor Today »-->August 12, 2008

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion

In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate.

The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that t he Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well — indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow’s calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.

The Western Encirclement of Russia

To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion — publicly stated — was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo’s separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts — including demands by various regions for independence from Russia — might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia’s requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

Resurrecting the Russian Sphere

Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.
The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

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Mama Bear

2008-08-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

Mama Bear is mad as hell and is not going to take it any more. The media in the United States is disgracefully one-sided in its coverage of the South Ossetian conflict. I am not a politician, not a journalist - just a busy mother of two kids. I cannot produce well-written political essays, but I can google up anything on the net, just like most of us.