Who Really Started the Russian-Georgian Conflict?
At a time when its circulation and share price are in freefall, you know that if a New York Times editorial gives even a backhanded criticism of a news story the paper has reported, the story is highly dubious to say the least.
So when a recent Times editorial referred to as “not surprising” supposed revelations in a news story several days earlier providing updates on Russia’s August invasion of Georgia, attentive readers immediately understood what a tempest in a teapot the story really must have been.
The story’s big “scoop” (based on leaked documents from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is investigating the August war and has not yet issued any formal findings) was that war is hell. It was shocked to find that the Georgian artillery barrage fired in early August to silence the attacks of the Ossetian rebels against Georgian territory were not carried out with the same laser-guided precision as those the Americans saw their own military use during the assault on Baghdad.
“Not surprising” is a mighty understatement.
Tiny Georgia does not rank in the top 100 nations of the world for per capita GDP, and its desperate pleas for inclusion in the ranks of NATO have so far been cruelly rebuffed. Georgia doesn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing what weapons systems to employ in battle, especially not when it is being menaced by its gigantic neighbor to the north, KGB-ruled Russia. For the OSCE, which has totally failed to take any action to protect Georgian sovereignty or to stand against the obliteration of democracy in Russia as its mandate calls upon it to do, to expect Georgia to react with calm and precise deliberation as it sees Russia move to lop off huge swaths of its limited territory may be just a bit unrealistic.
To be sure, though, as a NATO pretender Georgia must be called to account if it acted with indifference to civilian lives, just as any civilized nation would be. But with all its technology America has accidentally killed many civilians in Iraq, and Georgia accidentally killed far fewer civilians (the Times report documents less than a dozen such cases) in Ossetia . Russian forces killed at least as many civilians, if not more, when they attacked. War is hell, and any war violates human rights. As the Times own editorial makes clear, this “doesn’t justify Moscow’s brutal invasion” of Georgia proper even if Russia sought to use civilian casualties as the pretext for that invasion, which it hasn’t done. If Russia had acknowledged and supported Georgia’s right to quell the Ossetian rebels with military force (just as Russia did in Chechnya), and invaded only because it saw Georgia being reckless with its weaponry and refusing Russian demands to desist, the world might have approved Russia’s actions.
But that’s not what happened. Russia moved into Ossetia, after massing forces on Georgia’s border well in advance and repeatedly shooting down Georgian surveillance aircraft, all the while doing nothing as a so-called “peacekeeper” in the region to impel the Ossetian rebels to stand down. A new report from Amnesty International confirms that Russia did nothing to control the Ossetian attacks on Georgia, and condemns Russia’s partisanship in this regard. It also confirms Russia was guilty of at least as many human rights violations as were the Georgians. It invaded Georgia not to save a few Ossetian civilians but to drive Georgia out of Ossetia once and for all, and to seize that territory for itself. Simultaneously, Russia occupied the separate region of Abkhazia, into which Georgia had not set a single toe or fired a single bullet. On top of that, Russia invaded Georgia proper, including the seizure of a naval base on Georgia’s remote sea coast. In the process, Russia killed scores of Georgian civilians using cluster munitions, and has been condemned for doing so by Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights Watch, to be sure, has also condemned Georgia — for using Grad rockets against Ossetia. HRW believes that Grad rockets are too inaccurate to be used in close proximity to civilian populations, and condemns their use for that reason alone. HRW doesn’t care whether Georgia has any alternatives in its arsenal to the Grad; if it lacks them, apparently, HRW would have Georgia submit to Russian aggression rather than defend itself, a rather harsh position indeed.
So even the Kremlin’s propagandists are ignoring the main thrust of the Times report, because they know full well that they are guilty of at least as much reckless disregard for civilian life as the Georgians. Indeed, Russian forces likely inflicted a great deal of the damage that was done in Ossetia as they used overwhelming firepower to drive the Georgian invaders out.
so basically it all means that russians and georgians are more or less equally fascist.
so why should we support georgian fascists again?
that aside, for any student of the history of world war II your remark about kaliningrad sounds nothing less than idiotic.
Poul,
Spoken as a true shill for communists.
There is no moral equivalence between a nation struggling to defend its borders against foreign aggression and a major military power attempting to lop sections of territory off its smaller weaker neighbors.
The claim that Russia is making; that it acted to protect South Ossetia from invasion by Georgia, does not begin to explain why Russia had military forces prepositioned, and on the move, to invade BOTH South Ossetia AND Abkhazia.
It also ignores the increasing artillery attacks by South Ossetian seperatists against Georgian military emplacements and villages in the area.
poul,
Are you sure you actually know what fascist means? Because it doesn’t sound like you do.
DanNY,
spoken as a true shill for fascists.
there is no moral equivalence between a nation brutally suppressing minorities within its borders and a major military power being less than absolutely altruistic in defending these minorities.
your demagoguery is so transparent the parody just writes itself.
poul begins the spin attempt with:
so basically it all means that russians and georgians are more or less equally fascist.
Basically? No, that’s not what it means.
Hint: People can go back and read the article all on their own and see what you’re doing. You do not have complete control of information so the “big lie” (or in your case the “ridiculously clumsy lie”) technique isn’t going to work too well for you.
But do keep on script, I guess. It’s all you really have.
Oh and the shift key is your friend. Use it. It will not mind.
poul is a tool… or a Democrat which is much the same thing.
What, poul, no calls for UN intervention? Saddam got ten years of free passes from your crowd despite abundant evidence of genocide against Kurds and Marsh Arabs.
Instant invasion? Would that be even more of a “rush to war”? Of course, Copperheads like you are always in favor of damaging US interests. Plenty of open land in Russia, why not move there?
How will the US confront Russia when its bankrupt? Frankly I don’t really care who’s at fault. I’d much rather have the US focused on keeping jobs going in the US than defending some pissant country half-way around the world.
what is amazing is the amount of idiots who automatically switch to ad hominem when faced with an argument they cannot digest.
i thought it’s characteristic only for leftie sites, but oh boy did you folks prove me wrong…
That war was about old scores, when those terrortory’s had been white Russia”s before the 1917 border limits had been imposed by the jewish leaders of the soviet union{communists}when it had fallen, and what had become nato, and the jewish control of that.
The georgians pushed it because of the jewish influence/collaberation with them, before the attacks, which was in the media. It was set up to blacken Russia’s name/people.
I find it humourous that the article wrote KGB controlled Russia, which it is not.
Putins/Medvedevs Russia is not communist, it is georgia that is that. Think back to how the georgian pimple called their president actually treated his own georgians during the rose revolution that recieved limited media coverage of, except for the spin put on it here in the west to make him seem a hero, because they used the word democracy.
Even then they knew they were going to precipitate their hopeless attack against osettia for political leverage/media coverage with the west/nato.
The socialist communists of the west, which the jewish support, are certainly on the move elswhere in the world, not just here with those who call themselves democrats, and their obama.
You got to be kidding.
That was the poorest attempt to rationalize a wrong I have possibly ever read.
So let me get this straight.The Georgians are not really at fault for starting the whole mess because they used rockets that were not the most accurate, and since the Russians responded to the provocation with better weapons and a superior fighting force they are to be blamed?
You must be a Repug–cause only they can spin that badly.
How will we confront Russia when we are bankrupt? By acting like crazy people with nothing to lose and intimidating them with our nuclear arsenal. That, or we wait until God slaughters the Russian army for being stupid enough to attack Israel.
There is a better response to La Russophobe’s lies and rationalizations on behalf of the Saakashvili regime.
And that is – watch the video at this URL or click on the link above:
http://www.dni.ru/polit/2008/11/18/153505.html
I suppose Kim Zigfeld can pretend that FSB got some U.S. Marine BDUs, slapped them on some American-trained Georgians, and got them to record war crimes on their cellphone cams. But the truth is the Georgian soldiers recorded their own attacks on civilians to savor later, including firing grenades into a Lada car carrying an Ossetian family. The Ossetian family of four was killed instantly, and you can watch the interview with the grandfather of the children.
This film is going to be shown in Washington D.C. very soon. I wonder if “Kim Zigfeld” will have the cojones to actually show his or her real face where the film is shown instead of hiding behind online anonynimity to attack others credentials on Russia while presenting absolutely none of “her” own.
Now you understand why Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) told the UK Telegraph that Georgia started the war and Russia finished it. Because he saw the intel from our own people who knew Georgia was trying to get a green light for war from the Bush Administration. And now you understand why Nick Kristof, Anne Applebaum, etc. have all tried so hard to distance themselves from Saakashvili in recent weeks, pretending that they and their colleagues weren’t going to expense-paid junkets in Georgia or shilling for the guy in the last two years, or that they didn’t repeat Georgian propaganda hook line and sinker.
Kim, we’re waiting for you to show up. Unlike at your blog, you can’t censor the truth here at PJM.
Talk about hypocrisy, this pseudonymous “Kim Zigfeld” writes for a Kremlin-connected magazine called Russia! even though this mysterious magazine is owned by the Kremlin-connected company TsUP, a company that is currently buying up the Russian internet media in order to bring this last bastion of Russian free speech under Kremlin control. Read Zigfeld’s own comments about TsUP–she denounced herself, and takes money from them. No wonder s/he uses a pseudonym to write these articles–the shame is too painful. It’s a big mystery whose interests the pseudonymous “Zigfeld” really serves. If anyone finds out which PR company actually funds the Kim Zigfeld project, the mystery would finally be solved.
(Kim Zigfeld / La Russophobe = Jamestown Foundation)
Robert A:
I would be interested in finding out more about any Kim Zigfeld/Jamestown Foundation connection. From what I understand, Jamestown started as a Washington D.C. job mill for defectors from the USSR in the early 1980s and somehow kept getting funded in spite of the collapse of the Soviet threat. (BTW, people like the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney Jr. were warning us not to be suckered by the Soviets’ taking a dive all the way up to 1991 when the party ended, but they persisted, with a lot of support from what Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex”).
After all, calling for a new Cold War with China is dangerous and steps on a lot of U.S. corporate toes, and it’s hard to fight someone you’re $2 trillion in hoc to. But continuing to wage the Cold War with Russia is relatively safe, or was until it led to actual innocent people dying in Ossetia, and the truth about that started to come out to the embarassment of Beltway enablers like the formerly wildly pro-Saakashvili Washington Post. And I would ask Kim Zigfeld which is more pro-government: the WaPost or Russia Today? It seems to me you can’t tell which is more party line, regardless of partisan identification, when it comes to Russia. The WaPost writers will more or less do what they are told by their State Department sources and buddies.
From the publically available reports, I have not been able to discern who funds Jamestown but I do know they were paying one of their writers, Vladimir Socor, who is based in Germany, about 50k a year in 2006. Multiply that figure by about ten writers/staffers and you have a fairly respectable budget paid out of some endowment. The question is, where does the private funding stop and the government friendliness endorsement begin? Jamestown didn’t seem to be as prominent as AEI or Heritage or have a revolving door with the Bush Administration but perhaps that is by design.
In any case, if you have some evidence that Zigfeld is linked to Jamestown, please post it here or shoot me an email at:
stevejnelson@yahoo.com.
Thanks.
are you serious? you don’t print my comment? kim tries to bring insight into the current kremlin and you allow these trolls to impugn her, but i can’t refer to well-known KGB tactics, such as blackmailing people into their service by threatening to disclose their homosexual escapades? oh come on now. don’t be such pansies.
Are you serious!? What kind of nonsense are you trying to peddle here?
Having a debate with a Communist/Russian nationalist is a total waste of time and bandwidth. Besides, you know that his time is on the clock and ours is leisure. Make his masters pay him for nothing.
poul: “there is no moral equivalence between a nation brutally suppressing minorities within its borders”
The “brutally suppressed minority” was only technically within Georgian borders given that it was occupied by Russian “peacekeepers” who barred Georgian government presence in Ossetia. Also, the “brutally suppressed minority” habitually shelled with non-JDAM-equipped explosive munitions the territory and people of the Georgian “aggressors.”
That was a civil revolt that the Georgians were morally obligated to put a stop to. Giving the Russians – who fomented the entire thing in the first place – their dishonest excuse to beat the snot out of Georgia.
Russia started it. Your arguments, such as they are, do not fit the facts.
Dan,
I’m hardly a troll, and I’m not on the clock. But at least you’re not using the usual Kim Zigfeld sock puppets of “Oliver Bronson” and “Leonard Daulton”. You speak of Kim as if she (or more likely he) were a real person using their real names instead of an anonymous blogging collective that basically Google-bombs people with stupid lies (here’s an example if you want to look), and is most likely a paid PR product:
http://larussophobeexposed.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-silly-lies-from-la-russophobe.html
If Kim were just a humble trollblogger who compulsively attacks people for kicks, she would take the bait and reply to me. The fact that she doesn’t suggests that would ruin her whole shtick. You would Google La Russophobe and instead of her Google bombing others it’s her brand online getting tarnished.
I suppose in Fred’s world anyone who wants accountability for why the U.S. had boots on the ground in Georgia – both military and contractors – in the weeks leading up to the war or why we were there in the first place is a Commie or Russian nationalist. So add Pat Buchanan to that august company, as dedicated a Reaganite anti-Communist as he has been his whole life, or better yet, Congressman Rohrbacher, an OC conservative Republican who served in the Reagan Administration.
Or maybe you guys can get your heads out of your rear ends and stop denying reality. Bush and McCain (and some of the Dems like Biden as well) completely stepped in it in Georgia. At best, they got duped by Saakashvili and his well-oiled PR machine (God knows where the Georgians got the cash for that 24-7 PR operation during the war). At worst, we winked and nodded at the ethnic cleansing of South Ossetia, ala the Croatian-led Operation Storm in the mid-90s which ethnically cleansed Serbs from Bosnia. Watch the video link above of Georgian troops hooting and hollering while pouring fire into apartment blocs with civilians and killing an Ossetian family by blowing up their car with a grenade launcher. Then get back to me about moral equivalence and all your other BS.
“Zigfields” entire argument relies on the premise that Georgia didn’t have any other weapons to use besides the unguided rockets that Tzhinvali was shelled with. Lets ignore the fact that this argument is inherently flawed; can he/she/it at least cite anyone with military credentials to confirm that? I highly doubt that Georgia had no other options, especially given the fact that millions of dollars, along with equipment and advisors was poured into the Georgian military by US, certain NATO countries and Israel. I find it hard to believe the story about “brave, poor, little Georgia”. They had sophisticated UAV’s that were shot down by the Russians, but no modern equipment which would have limited civilian casualties?