- Miheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the
Olympic Games to cover Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of
South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision
to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.
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- Nasser's blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War.
Saakashvili's blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia.
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- After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own
country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of
thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into
Georgia in 48 hours.
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- Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian
army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi, and to seize Gori, birthplace
of Stalin.
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- Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush,
Dick Cheney, and John McCain, and America's lone democratic ally in the
Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and
present the world with a fait accompli.
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- Mikheil did not reckon on the rage or resolve of the
Bear.
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- American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia
started this fight Russia finished it. People who start wars don't
get to decide how and when they end.
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- Russia's response was "disproportionate" and
"brutal," wailed Bush.
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- True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon
for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers
were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?
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- Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush.
But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force
it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic
claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer
Moscow to Tbilisi?
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- Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?
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- When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, we celebrated.
When Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo broke
from Serbia, we rejoiced. Why, then, the indignation when two provinces,
whose peoples are ethnically separate from Georgians and who fought for
their independence, should succeed in breaking away?
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- Are secessions and the dissolution of nations laudable
only when they advance the agenda of the neocons, many of whom viscerally
detest Russia?
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- That Putin took the occasion of Saakashvili's provocative
and stupid stunt to administer an extra dose of punishment is undeniable.
But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed
Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany.
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- When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed
its bases in Cuba, dissolved the evil empire, let the Soviet Union break
up into 15 states, and sought friendship and alliance with the United States,
what did we do?
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- American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags
to loot the Russian nation. Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we
moved our military alliance into Eastern Europe, then onto Russia's doorstep.
Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former republics of the Soviet Union
are now NATO members.
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- Bush, Cheney, and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine
and Georgia into NATO. This would require the United States to go to war
with Russia over Stalin's birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean
Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia's Black Sea fleet.
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- When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying
war with Russia?
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- The United States unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic
Missile treaty because our technology was superior, then planned to site
anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against
Iranian missiles, though Iran has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs. A Russian
counter-offer to have us together put an antimissile system in Azerbaijan
was rejected out of hand.
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- We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan
through Georgia to Turkey to cut Russia out. Then we helped dump over regimes
friendly to Moscow with democratic "revolutions" in Ukraine and
Georgia, and tried to repeat it in Belarus.
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- Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see
ourselves as others see us is not high among them.
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- Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan, where
Europe had opted out of the Cold War after Moscow installed those SS-20
missiles east of the Elbe. And Europe had abandoned NATO, told us to go
home and become subservient to Moscow.
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- How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western
Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put
missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build
pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment
to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training
Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how
would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?
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- For a decade, some of us have warned about the folly
of getting into Russia's space and getting into Russia's face. The chickens
of democratic imperialism have now come home to roost in Tbilisi.
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- Copyright Creators Syndicate, Inc
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