Video on Georgia Russia Conflict

This is an interesting interview on the Georgia Russia conflict moderated by Fareed Zakaria on CNN. It is reasonably balanced although it has precious little to say about the original actions of Georgia who tried to take control by force of South Ossetia killing a number of Russian peacekeepers in the process.

Russians detain Georgian soldiers at port.

This is from IHT.
The Russians are snubbing western criticism and rubbing in the Georgian defeat. Confiscating the Humvees that were used in joint Georgian U.S. military manouvers will probably enrage the U.S. The U.S. paid no attention to Russian objections to the manouvers and so this will be part of the punishment. It will be interesting to see what the U.S. does. From all these actions it seems that the Russians have no intention of going back to the status quo in which the U.S. expected Russia to co-operate on various issues even while helping to create a situation where Russia was surrounded by hostile regimes. At the very least Georgia can forget about re-integrating Abkazia and South Ossetia into Georgia. So far it seems as if the U.S. and some European nations still support Georgia joining NATO but this may prove impossible so long as the issue of Abkazia nad South Ossetia remains unsolved.

Russians detain Georgian soldiers at port
By Michael Schwirtz and C.J. Chivers
Published: August 19, 2008
POTI, Georgia: Russian forces detained 21 Georgian soldiers in the Black Sea port of Poti on Tuesday. On a day when Russian troops continued to dig in to positions across Georgia, the detention of the troops - who were bound and blindfolded - was further evidence of continued military activity on Georgian territory by Russia despite assurances that its troops would withdraw.
The Georgians, who were blindfolded and bound, were taken by the Russians to a military base at Senaki, along with five armored Humvees from the U.S. military that were to have been shipped back to the United States. The Humvees had been used in joint U.S.-Georgian military exercises three months ago, said Eduard Machevoriani, the port's commercial director.
A top Russian military official, Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, said that the Georgian soldiers were disarmed at a checkpoint Monday and that they had been armed with automatic rifles, submachine guns and grenade launchers, Interfax reported.
Another senior Russian military official, Colonel Igor Konashenkov, said the Russians would destroy all weapons and ammunition that they seized during their operation in Georgia but would take all tanks and armored vehicles that they find in good condition. Among the seized arms are 2,000 small arms and 65 tanks, of which 44 were in "excellent condition," he said, according to Interfax.
On Sunday, President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia announced that Russians would begin withdrawing from Georgia proper into the two pro-Russian breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where the conflict began Aug. 7.

Crisis in Georgia: How Misha messed up..

This is from the Globe and Mail.
This is a good article in that it details some of the background to the conflict. It also does not gloss over the fact that it was Georgia not Russia that in effect started the conflict by its attack on South Ossetia's capital. In the process they managed to kill some Russian peacekeepers who were stationed there as part of a long standing agreement. There were talks scheduled within the next few days just before the attack. Perhaps Saakashvili thought he would strengthen his hand or come to the talks with a fait accompli. Perhaps too he thought that with U.S. backing him the Russians would roll over and play dead. For now Georgians will rally around Saakashvili but once the dust settles the opposition will probably rise against him since he has caused Georgia to in effect lose any hope of regaining South Ossetia or Abkazia and has caused many casualties and damage to Georgia. Although Bush and Merkel continue to support Georgia's membership in NATO other European countries may have a quite different view. If Georgia does get to join NATO this will be a sign that we are in Cold War II an even more dangerous sequel to the first Cold War.


Crisis in Georgia: How Misha messed up
Why on earth did Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili provoke this week's conflict and rekindle Russian expansionism?

MARK MACKINNON
Globe and Mail Update
August 16, 2008 at 11:50 AM EDT

As fighting raged all over his tiny former Soviet country this week, a CNN anchor asked Georgia's brash and unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili whether he had believed his country could actually win a military showdown with Russia. "I'm not crazy," the President answered in his American-inflected English.
Others weren't so sure. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev charged that Mr. Saakashvili had acted like a "lunatic" in provoking the conflict and said he needed to be removed from office. A French diplomat suggested Mr. Saakashvili had been mad to take on Russia, and American officials wondered how he could have so badly misread their signals calling for restraint in his efforts to reclaim the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Many of his own people are shaking their heads at how "Misha," as he is affectionately known, could have backed their country into such a dangerous corner.
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It was on Monday afternoon in the tree-lined city of Gori that Mr. Saakashvili came face to face with the scale of the error he made in attacking South Ossetia and triggering war with Russia, Georgia's giant neighbour to the north.
Sporting a green camouflage flak jacket, he was preparing to address the international media when Russian jets suddenly roared overhead. Someone in his entourage shouted, "Air! Air!" and Mr. Saakashvili looked at the sky, then broke into a sprint. Eventually he dove for cover, his bodyguards piling on top, hoping to shield their President from shrapnel.
Many bombs fell in and around Gori — the geographic heart of this strikingly beautiful country on the southeastern edge of Europe — and none came close to hurting him.
But the video of him ducking and running may prove to be the bookend to a tumultuous political career that began five years ago with another famous image: Mr. Saakashvili striding into Georgia's Soviet-era parliament building clutching a rose, at the vanguard of a democratic revolution that was supposed to remake not only his own tiny country but the entire former USSR.
Even if he remains in office after this crisis, the era of hope, democracy and pro-Western reform that Mr. Saakashvili — still boyish-looking at 40 — was supposed to herald has ended. The moment he ordered his troops to attack the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali a week ago, Georgia once more became a failed state, a place where wars, coups and instability are the norm and one that Western investors would be wise to avoid.
Georgia's loss is Russia's gain. Moscow is once again emerging as the regional hegemon, on the verge of pushing the U.S. back out of the former Soviet Union, an area Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calls "the near abroad." The leaders of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all former Soviet republics, rushed to stand with Mr. Saakashvili in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi this week in what was as much a demonstration of fear as it was of solidarity. They were joined by the President of Poland, another country that remembers when the Red Army regularly ranged far beyond its borders and thus fears Russia's resurgence.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is probably the most concerned member of the quintet. While Poland and the Baltic states are under the protective umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukraine is not. Along with Georgia's, its application to join NATO was shelved back in April for fear of offending Russia, which considers both states to be properly part of its "sphere of influence."
It all makes Mr. Saakashvili's decision to attack last Friday — while the world was distracted by the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games — extremely difficult to understand. In the name of "reuniting" Georgia, which has never been united since it gained independence in 1991, hundreds of people are dead (each side accuses the other of ethnic cleansing) and Georgia's sovereignty is under renewed threat.
As the sound of gunfire recedes, questions about Mr. Saakashvili's judgment — and his ability to continue governing — are growing louder.
Young and restless
Mr. Saakashvili has always been bold, daring and idealistic. Born into a family of Tbilisi intelligentsia in the Soviet period, he was a member of the generation who grew up as the Communist bloc was crumbling and the Soviet Union was splitting apart. What had seemed eternal suddenly disappeared and the old rules vanished, providing an opportunity for his generation — less indoctrinated than its elders — to write new ones.
Even though he had grown up in the USSR, born in Leonid Brezhnev's time and gone to school in Mikhail Gorbachev's, Mr. Saakashvili was never going to be the homo sovieticus the Russian leaders tried to create. At one of our meetings, he told me that he took particular relish in being interviewed by The Globe and Mail, since it was the first foreign newspaper he had ever read after discovering copies of it in the library of Kiev University, where he studied international law in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He surreptitiously read every page, soaking up information usually blocked by the Soviet censors.
After the Soviet Union fell apart and Georgia became an independent state, Mr. Saakashvili received a U.S.-government sponsored fellowship to continue his law studies at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1994.
While in New York, he did exactly what the U.S. State Department had hoped when it sent him and thousands of other young students from the former Soviet Union to schools in the U.S: He fell in love with America.
He initially intended on settling in New York and practising law, but in 1995 he was personally headhunted by Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who was looking to surround himself with talented young Georgians unhindered by old ideas. Mr. Saakashvili came home and, at just 26, was elected to parliament, along with Zhurab Zhvania and Nino Burdjanadze, two other young Georgians recruited to the cause. The young lawyer quickly made a name for himself as an anti-corruption campaigner and within five years his mentor made him justice minister.
But Mr. Saakashvili was cut from a very different cloth than Mr. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who won fame for helping bring an end to the Cold War.
Dubbed the Silver Fox, Mr. Shevardnadze was a cautious and careful consensus builder who effectively negotiated away Tbilisi's hold over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in exchange for an end to the fighting and Russian interference that plagued his country during the early 1990s. While he spoke of cracking down on Georgia's endemic corruption problem, he was reluctant to tackle the problem head-on, fearful of upsetting the country's hard-won stability.
For Mr. Saakashvili — stereotypically Georgian in his passion and taste for the impulsive — these were unforgivable compromises.
A year after he was made justice minister, he resigned, declaring that Mr. Shevardnadze was complicit in the criminality bedevilling Georgia.
In opposition, he caught the eye of George Soros, the American billionaire and philanthropist who had initially become involved in Georgia at Mr. Shevardnadze's request. Mr. Soros also had become irritated by the Silver Fox's go-slow approach, and he decided that Mr. Saakashvili was the embodiment of Georgia's future.
The Soros foundations began pouring millions of dollars into organizations that were nominally interested in free media and democracy building but mainly served to undermine Mr. Shevardnadze's rule and push for Mr. Saakashvili to succeed him (including the youth movement Kmara, which would provide the backbone of the protests during the Rose Revolution).
On the pipeline
The U.S. State Department came to see Georgia that same way Mr. Soros did, although for very different reasons: The country stands on a key transit route for getting oil and gas from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea to markets in the West. The world's largest and most expensive pipeline project — the $4-billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil line — was to run across Georgian territory, and Mr. Shevardnadze's habit of playing Moscow and Washington off each other was deemed a risk to the investment.
Russia had always vehemently opposed the BTC, viewing the pipeline's route, which dances along the South Caucasus while carefully avoiding both Russia's territory and Iran's, as an effort to break through its growing stranglehold on the supply of energy to Europe.
For a country few outside the old Soviet Union had previously heard of, Georgia was suddenly thrust into the heart of international intrigue when U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the BTC pipeline was of "vital strategic interest" to his country. The U.S. embassy in Tbilisi began to court Mr. Saakashvili, as well as Mr. Zhvania and Ms. Burdjanadze, who had joined him in opposition.
Mr. Saakashvili was a fast-rising force in Georgian politics. He founded the United National Movement, which caught the imagination of voters with a vision of Georgia as a modern, European country that could also reclaim its pre-Russian history by using the red-and-white, five-cross flag of the medieval kingdom of Georgia as its new party banner.
Just months after quitting Mr. Shevardnadze's cabinet, Mr. Saakashvili was elected mayor of Tbilisi, setting the stage for his head-to-head confrontation with the Silver Fox.
In many ways, the Rose Revolution in 2003 — which saw massive street protests force Mr. Shevardnadze from office and Mr. Saakashvili elected in his place — was as much an American victory over Russia on the geopolitical chessboard as it was a pro-democracy uprising. Within two years of the revolt, oil was flowing westward through a completed BTC pipeline and Georgia was seeking NATO membership with U.S. help.
Mr. Saakashvili's brashness and unpredictability made him the perfect leader for the protests. Even his closest associates don't know what inspired him to carry a rose as he charged into parliament to demand Mr. Shevardnadze's resignation over election fraud. The idea was Mr. Saakashvili's alone, they say.
The revolt inspired copycat people-power movements that overthrew the old order in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine the following year (the Orange Revolution) and Kyrgyzstan (the Pink, or Tulip, Revolution) in 2005. The Kremlin initially feared that the wave of "colour revolutions" would wash over Red Square too.
Mr. Saakashvili won 96 per cent of the vote in the barely contested post-revolution elections, and once more made the five-cross banner Georgia's national flag. His audacious style helped him carry out astonishing reforms during his first years in office — including a remarkable decision to simultaneously fire all the country's notoriously corrupt traffic policemen, rehiring only a third after forcing them to apply for their old jobs.
With Mr. Zhvania as his prime minister and Ms. Burdjanadze as speaker of parliament, the trio rapidly remade Georgia, at least in the eyes of the White House, from a corrupt post-Soviet backwater into a plucky friend of the West and a favoured destination of Western investors. He even won some belated admiration from Mr. Shevardnadze, who told me after the Rose Revolution that Mr. Saakashvili had the country on the right path, though the septuagenarian worried that "the youngsters" would take it too far.
Autocratic turn
In the eyes of some of his one-time allies, however, Mr. Saakashvili's early successes had the effect of convincing the young President that only he could fix Georgia. Worried that he was turning into an autocrat, a group of 14 non-governmental organizations that initially backed him signed a petition warning that the Rose Revolution was becoming "anti-democratic." When Mr. Zhvania mysteriously died in 2005 from gas poisoning in 2005, Mr. Saakashvili lost his closest friend and a moderating influence whom colleagues say often talked him out of rash decisions.
Radical economic reforms inevitably left many Georgians behind. Discontent grew as Mr. Saakashvili slashed the size of the civil service, and opposition demonstrations — including some organized by a group known simply as Anti-Soros — became a regular feature on Tbilisi's streets last year. In November, the President ordered riot police to disperse the protests with tear gas, water cannons and batons.
With the opposition in disorder, he called snap elections and won a second term in January with a much less resounding, though still impressive, 53 per cent of the vote. His reputation in Europe was badly tarnished by the November crackdown. Ms. Burdjanadze, long his ally and arguably the country's second most popular politician, signalled her own discomfort with her snap decision to quit politics four months ago.
Mr. Saakashvili's impulsive penchant, combined with his overt distrust of nearly all things Russian, led to the escalating confrontation with Moscow that finally boiled over this week. In his world view, the Russians' military presence as "peacekeepers" in separatist South Ossetia and Abkhazia was the leash holding Georgia back, guaranteeing the Kremlin's lingering and malicious influence over its ex-colony.
Though the territories are small — and Abkhazians and South Ossetians are ethnically distinct from both Georgians and Russians, with their own languages — Mr. Saakashvili saw the Russian presence as a present and future threat to his country's sovereignty. The nebulous state of the two regions gives the Kremlin a lever for destabilizing the country should it ever get too close to its ambitions of joining NATO and the European Union.
To Georgia's young President, the United States — the country that had given him his education and then backed his rise to power — was his country's potential saviour from what he perceived as renewed Russian imperialism.
"People have been feeling the change — that's obvious. They feel that things are moving forward," Mr. Saakashvili proudly told me a few years ago when we met in his office for a talk about the successes and failures of the Rose Revolution, during which he lavished praise on the U.S. for its support. The phone rang and he asked me to excuse him for a moment: It was George W. Bush.
Determined to tie his country to the West, Mr. Saakashvili enthusiastically signed Georgia up to the American-led war in Iraq, and until last week only the United States and Britain were contributing more troops to the "coalition of the willing" (the 2,000 Georgian soldiers in Iraq were flown home this week on U.S. military aircraft to help deal with the crisis). The road connecting Tbilisi to its international airport was renamed President George W. Bush Street.
Last straw for Moscow
The step that sealed Mr. Saakashvili's fate was his decision this year to formally seek NATO membership.
Despite Mr. Bush's enthusiastic support, the bid predictably failed, with France and Germany voicing concerns about taking on an ally that had outstanding territorial disputes with Russia. Old Europe didn't want to see the Third World War break out over a place called South Ossetia.
The fact that Mr. Saakashvili went ahead with the bid was enough to convince the Kremlin once and for all that he was an implacable enemy. Now that it has humbled him militarily, many expect a Russian-sponsored push to oust him from within.
While Russia doesn't seem interested in occupying Tbilisi, it could easily throw its clout behind Georgia's political opposition or, more dangerously, use its separatist allies as proxy armies. South Ossetian irregulars were reportedly behind the violence that continued after the French-brokered ceasefire this week, while troops from the second separatist region, Abkhazia, launched their own attack on Georgian troops in the northwest of the country.
Washington has escalated its tough talk in recent days, dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region and using warships and military aircraft to deliver aid. But with its military already overstretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and worried about a potential confrontation with Iran, it seems unlikely the U.S. can offer much more than moral support.
Although, in reality, Russia and the United States have been backstage antagonists for years now, the sound of explosions echoing off the Caucasus mountain range also heralds the final end of the hopeful era that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow and Washington are once more now fully at odds over everything from the World Trade Organization (which the U.S. has blocked Russia's efforts to join) to Iran's nuclear program (which the Kremlin has helped to build). South Ossetia is only the first hot conflict zone in this New Cold War.
"Georgia is the first test case... We should realize what is at stake for America: America is losing the whole region," an increasingly desperate Mr. Saakashvili said this week in an attempt to rally the West to Georgia's side. While Russia said it had accepted the ceasefire, he charged the next day that Russian troops were encircling Tbilisi, a claim later denied by his own Interior Minister.
All of which calls into question why Mr. Saakshvili chose Aug. 8 to launch his military offensive in South Ossetia, which had been outside Tbilisi's control since a short war in 1992. While his election platform this year centred on restoring Georgian authority in the breakaway territories, few expected him to try it militarily. Given that Mr. Putin, who retains wide power in the country as Mr. Medvedev's Prime Minister, had issued Russian passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians during his eight-year presidency, a heavy-handed military response to Georgia's assault was as predictable as it was disproportionate.
Ten Russian peacekeepers reportedly died in the initial Georgian attack, which followed days of tit-for-tat shelling between South Ossetian and Georgian forces. The Russian fatalities made a counteroffensive inevitable even if Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin hadn't been waiting for just such an excuse to humble Mr. Saakashvili.
Short tempers
Indeed, they were waiting. Ever since the Rose Revolution, the Kremlin has viewed Mr. Saakashvili as an American pawn and his government as a threat to Russia's resurgence. The BTC pipeline blew a hole in Moscow's efforts to monopolize the supply of energy to Europe, while the effort to join NATO was taken as something close to a declaration of war.
"In the end, Saakashvili clearly underestimated Putin's personal hatred for him — an enmity that became intense after an aide told Putin that Saakashvili described him as 'Lilliputian,'ƒ" columnist Yulia Latynina wrote in The Moscow Times this week. Mr. Putin, who stands five-foot-seven, is known to be insecure about his height.
The impetuousness that was so useful when Mr. Saakashvili was leading street demonstrations has proved to be a dangerous trait in a national leader in such a sensitive corner of the world.
Zaza Gachechiladze, editor-in-chief of The Messenger, an English-language newspaper in Tbilisi, said the sudden war smelled to him of a Kremlin trap. The shelling in South Ossetia was the bait, and Mr. Saakashvili leaped at it.
"It was a very well-organized provocation," he said in a telephone interview. "Unfortunately for Georgia, we made this dramatic and fatal step [of attacking South Ossetia]."
For now, he said, Georgians will rally around their flag and their leader — thousands of citizens attended a pro-Saakashvili rally in the centre of Tbilisi this week — because few want to see a return to Russian domination. But eventually a reckoning will follow. Many will look to see what Ms. Burdjanadze, who has twice served capably as acting president, does and her evaluation of Misha's latest gambit may determine what happens next.
"When there's a threat to the country's existence as such, all the parties are united," said Mr. Gachechiladze, whose own paper saw one reporter killed and two others injured during the Russian counterattack. "Afterwards, we can discuss what went wrong and who has to pay — and whether he will stay as President."
Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in the Middle East

Raimondo on Saakashvili

This is from antiwar.com. Not only Raimondo rails against Georgia but Pat Buchanan does so as well. Buchanan also has an article at antiwar.com.
The Georgian role in starting this war and their attacks on civilians is downplayed if even mentioned by the mainstream media. Of course U.S. official spokespeople such as Rice also barely mention this but that is to be expected. The lack of critical acumen is to be expected in some sources but the omission seems almost universal. Reports of Russian misdeeds however are legion. One would expect such reports from Georgian media naturally but they are often reported uncritically by the western media. This is not to say that some of these reports are not true. Some probably are. However, much of the violence also seems a result of general lawlessness and armed gangs or militias.

Mikheil Saakashvili:War Criminal
A politician's hubris causes untold human suffering
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the geopolitical analyses and ideological posturing on the occasion of the Three-Day War between Russia and Georgia, we are losing sight of the very real human costs of this conflict: thousands of civilians killed and grievously wounded, a city, Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, in ruins, and the hopes and dreams of the inhabitants of this largely overlooked backwater dashed on the rocks of a politician's hubris.
That politician is Mikheil Saakashvili, the all too glib president of Georgia, whose slickness is so apparent that it seems to leave an oily residue on every word he utters. The decidedly apolitical, non-ideological Web site Reliefweb put it this way:
"The place that has suffered most is South Ossetia which is home to both ethnic Ossetians and Georgians, the latter accounting for about a third of the population. The destruction there has been appalling and it looks as though many hundreds of civilians have died, in the first place as a result of the initial Georgian assault of August 7-8. Gosha Tselekhayev, an Ossetian interpreter in Tskhinvali with whom I spoke by telephone on August 10 said, 'I am standing in the city center, but there's no city left.'
"Ossetians fleeing the conflict zone talk of Georgian atrocities and the indiscriminate killing of civilians."
They may be talking of Georgian atrocities, but we in the West have not heard them – nor will we, given the bias of our media, which is in thrall to the Georgia lobby and its U.S. government sponsors. The "mainstream" has already settled on a narrative to explain events in the Caucasus, and nothing short of a South Ossetian holocaust will wake them from their hypnotic state. The Russians, in their view, have got to be the bad guys, i.e., the aggressors. Anything that doesn't fit into that storyline is cut from the script. Yet, as Reliefweb reports:
"On August 7, after days of shooting incidents in the South Ossetian conflict zone, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili made a speech in which he said that he had given the Georgian villagers orders not to fire, that he wanted to offer South Ossetia 'unlimited autonomy' within the Georgian state, with Russia to be a guarantor of the arrangement.
"Both sides said they were discussing a meeting the next day to discuss how to defuse the clashes.
"That evening, however, Saakashvili went for the military option. The Georgian military launched a massive artillery attack on Tskhinvali, followed the next day by a ground assault involving tanks.
"This was a city with no pure military targets, full of civilians who had been given no warning and were expecting peace talks at any moment."
As if to underscore the utter indifference of Western media to the suffering of anyone politically incorrect enough to be pro-Russian, CNN broadcast footage of war-torn Tskhinvali even as its news announcer solemnly "reported" that the Russians were wreaking devastation on a city in Georgia proper, a classic case of the Orwellian media manipulation techniques that pass for journalism in the West. An unintended irony: the footage was a few feet from the spot where Russian peacekeepers had been slaughtered, the first victims of the Georgian assault. Or was it intended?
The tragicomic aspects of this media-induced cognitive dissonance came to the fore on Fox News the other day, when the announcer was interviewing a 12-year-old American girl who happened to be sitting in a café in Tskhinvali when Georgian bombs started raining down on her head. The announcer's eyebrows shot up when the girl thanked the Russian soldiers. After the girl and her aunt finished their recounting of Georgian atrocities, the announcer capped off his report by intoning: "There are gray areas in war."
The matter of attacking civilians is no doubt a moral "gray area" for the neocons at Fox, but what about the rest of the media – or is there no longer much of a difference, at least when it comes to the Russian question?
The Georgians were the aggressors here, and not only that, it was a particularly vicious sneak attack, undertaken while "peace talks" were supposedly taking place. As Reliefweb put it:
"The attack looked designed to take everybody by surprise – perhaps because much of the Russian leadership was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games. It also unilaterally destroyed the negotiating and peacekeeping arrangements, under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that have been in place for 16 years. Russian peacekeeping troops based in South Ossetia were among those killed in the Georgian assault."
The Georgian offensive provoked a massive exodus to the north. Thousands fled, and with good reason. As the Guardian reports:
"Many had traveled in their nightclothes on rocky roads through the mountains and gave bloodcurdling accounts of Georgian atrocities. 'I came in the boot of a car. Georgian snipers were firing at us from the forest. My brother stayed to fight. Our grandparents' home was reduced to rubble. We don't know where they are. Nothing is left of their village. It was totally destroyed by rockets and tank fire,' Alisa Mamiyeva, 26, a teacher in Tskhinvali, said from the safety of Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia."
The South Ossetians claim 1,400 dead, thus far, most of them victims of the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali, and Vladimir Putin went so far as to accuse the Georgians of launching a "genocide." According to the BBC, however, "Russia failed to back up its claims of Georgian atrocities." Not that the West is all that interested in airing the evidence. As Variety put it in a piece on how this war is being reported,
"Coverage in the U.S. and Europe is leaning heavily toward reports on the Georgian casualties of Russian bombing over the weekend. Few details are being given about the thousands said to have been killed when Georgia attacked Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Thursday and Friday."
The blatant media bias displayed by the "mainstream" news organizations is more than matched by the shameful cover-up of Georgian atrocities by the mainline "human rights" organizations, first and foremost Human Rights Watch. In the most brazen display of willful ignorance since Walter Duranty overlooked the Soviet gulags, HRW spokeswoman Anna Neistat told the Guardian that Ossetian claims of Georgian atrocities were "suspicious":
"The figure of 2,000 people killed is very doubtful. Our findings so far do not in any way confirm the Russian statistics. On the contrary, they suggest the numbers are exaggerated."
Neistat avers that no more than 44 were killed and around 200 were wounded in the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali. Perhaps she should talk to International Red Cross spokeswoman Anna Nelson, who reports area hospitals "overflowing" with the dead and the wounded.
The voices of the Ossetians are barely reaching the West, but when they do – as in this Australian Broadcasting Corp. news report – they underscore the sheer ugliness of HRW's appalling apologetics::
"One woman told how a family of four including two children tried to flee from a Georgian tank but it 'fired on their car and they were all burned' to death, said Angela, who like all the refugees only gave her first name. In another incident, a woman eight months pregnant and two family members fleeing from the city under attack were hit by tank fire and 'nothing remained of them,' Angela said.
"She saw the Georgian tanks roll into Tskhinvali, the soldiers shouting 'Hail Saakashvili,' who is the president of Georgia. 'They destroyed the city,' added Inna, 33, who said she could not understand how the Georgian troops 'could do that to civilians.'
"'You see your friend's home burning and there's nothing you can do. You just watch and cry, it's a genocide,' Inna said. An old woman among the refugees said all she had left was the dress she was wearing. 'My house is destroyed,' she said."
More important than the hypocrisy and ideology-induced moral myopia of the "human rights" crowd, however, is the very real human suffering that is being pointedly overlooked. These are real people being killed and rendered homeless, people who now live in terror and uncertainty while we in the West sit around discussing the geopolitical implications as if individual human beings were pieces on a chessboard.
The U.S. is now delivering "humanitarian" aid under the aegis and protection of the U.S. military, a gesture that underscores the Bizarro World absurdity of a foreign policy that has us arming the Georgians and then paying to clean up the damage done by our proxies. This is truly an odd sort of "humanitarianism," one inextricably linked to the inveterate sadism of our foreign policy.
This "humanitarian" gambit is just that: a device designed to legitimize our growing intervention in the region. While Defense Secretary Robert Gates is clearly not at all thrilled by the prospect of U.S. soldiers entering the battle zone, it seems unavoidable, at some point, since we'll be supervising "humanitarian" flights and relief efforts. (Not to mention future military joint exercises involving U.S. and Georgian forces, such as the ones that concluded shortly before the war commenced.) With Russian troops intent on staying in Ossetia, Abkhazia, and other regions such as Adjaria eager to take this opportunity to break free of the Georgian central government, the likelihood of renewed fighting is high.
To Antiwar.com's audience, and regular readers of this column, none of this – Saakashvili's folly, the Ossetian question, the volatile immediacy of the crisis – is anything new. As I wrote in November 2006:
"Russian 'peacekeepers,' OSCE 'observers,' South Ossetian troops, and the U.S.-trained-and-equipped Georgian military are facing off along ill-defined borders, with renegade 'rebel' bands supporting one side or the other running wild in the no-man's land in between. This is a recipe for disaster, and an armed confrontation is bound to occur, with the distinct possibility of escalating into all-out warfare. The Russians would soon be drawn in, and the U.S. could not escape being dragged into this particular vortex – with fateful consequences all 'round.
"I can just hear McCain barnstorming the country in '08, denouncing 'Russian imperialism' and demanding that we 'stop Putin' in the Caucasus before Russian troops cross the Bering Straits."
We at Antiwar.com have been warning of the dangers of Russophobia, which seems to have run rampant on the neoconservative right in recent days. It was always present (at least since the Kosovo war) as an animating force on the "humanitarian interventionist" left, i.e., George Soros & Co. As much as I hate to say "I told you so," in this case, it seems unavoidable, albeit not in very good taste. Yet there's no time for such niceties, these days. It is time to be blunt and get right to the point.
Antiwar.com is fighting a war on two flanks: a constant struggle against the disinformation dumped daily into the airwaves, most of it originating in the Washington offices of the War Party, and another battle on another front – a war for our very survival.
The rising costs, human as well as financial, of carrying on this campaign for truth are exacting a heavy toll. Our tiny staff is grossly overworked, we're cutting corners left and right, and we don't know where the money to make it through the next quarter is going to come from. And that's where you come in.
Look, you're being dunned daily on the main page of the site, and I don't want to hector you much more. All I can say is that Antiwar.com has earned your financial support, and then some. We've been waging a pretty effective fight against the War Party, giving them tit for tat and giving our readers a far more realistic perspective on world events than any "mainstream" outlet. Yet the War Party still poses a deadly danger, and they're always up to new tricks. More importantly, we don't have the resources they can mobilize at a moment's notice, and we don't have any hopes of doing so. But we don't need all that moolah. We just need to reach the American people with our message, and we can do that quite effectively via the Internet. They have mega-millions, but we have something they can never match: the credibility our brand name has built up over the years.
Since 1995, we've been in the front lines of the battle, breaking the real news and fact-checking government officials within an inch of their lives – and we need your help to keep going. Once again, we're swimming against the tide on this South Ossetia-Georgia story, debunking the official media narrative and bringing our readers a commodity more precious than gold: the truth.
That's why it's so important that we continue our work, but we can't do it without your support. We depend on the generosity and acute awareness of our readers, who know how important it is to win the battle for hearts and minds. We have the War Party on the run, but we need your support to keep going. Your contribution is 100% tax-deductible, and you can give online or via mail. Contribute today. ~ Justin Raimondo