We might as well have a straight out throw down on this issue right here and now.

I don't have a dog in this hunt, as they say. I just want to hear the full arguments on both sides.

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Suppose all that the accusations against Russia are true. Maybe Russian wanted a war and provoked Georgia. Maybe Russia wants to extend its influence. Russia did kill innocent civilians when it bombed Gori. It went far beyond what was necessary to repel an invasion. Georgia was an internationally recognized sovereign state. Technically, it may not have been an aggressor. It was attacking territory to which it had a formally plausible claim, contested by no other sovereign state. It probably killed fewer South Ossetian civilians than originally supposed. Some South Ossetians killed innocent civilians and engaged in ethnic cleansing. Russia destroyed a lot of stuff after the fighting died down. Maybe Russia resents the freedom-loving propensities of tiny plucky Georgia. None of this makes any difference. Russia was still in the right, and Georgia in the wrong.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
As well as those who armed them.

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Precisely
Plus the media that chose not to ask right questions at the start of this wasteful war.
The Russians may have exaggerated some things but they were right on target about Georgia's bloody attacks on Ossetian civilians. As well as exposing those powers that chose to escalate this conflict

However, there is another development that may be of equal interest. It seems that Reuters is now saying that, partly as a result of his Russophobic campaign around this conflict, Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain has established a five-point lead over Obama.

And that may be the most important point of the conflict as far as Americans are concerned; it seems to have helped McCain strengthen a faltering campaign.

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While Russia has been politically and militarily strengthened by Saakashvili’s adventure, the US has had the limits of its global power demonstrated.

US President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have appealed for Russia to respect international legality, prompting Russian leaders to justify their war with reference to the Bush administration’s justifications for its own military adventures.

“Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages … And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed 10 Ossetian villages at once … these leaders must be taken under protection”, Putin responded sarcastically.

Bush’s August 15 comments that “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century”, is unlikely to provoke anything but laughter.

The Bush administration must bear much of the responsibility for this war, especially for its diplomatic support for, and military aid to, the ultranationalist Saakashvili, both directly and through its Israeli proxy.

However, it seems unlikely that the US directly authorised Saakashvili’s attack on South Ossetia. The main economic significance of Georgia to the West is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that takes natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Turkey’s mediterranean coast.

This pipeline does not run through Abkhazia or South Ossetia and no Western interests are threatened by Russian control of these territories.

The current fighting, however, does have the potential of threatening the pipeline. Furthermore, Saakashvili’s recklessness has vindicated Franco-German opposition to Georgia’s NATO membership.

On August 15, Saakashvili agreed to a US-supported EU-initiated ceasefire that would leave Russia in effective control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia while Russian troops withdraw from Georgia-proper.

While he insisted that this arrangement was not the basis of a permanant peace settlement, Saakashvili is not in a position to affect the final outcome.

Russia has drawn parallels with the Western-supported independence of Kosova from Serbia (which has left Kosova under Western “supervision”) and hinted that it may end its opposition to Kosovan independence if the West recognises a similar Russian-supervised independence arrangement for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Unification between South Ossetia and North Ossetia-Alania is supported by most Ossetians.

However the current conflictis eventually resolved, it is clear that the division of the world according to the needs great powers on behalf of competing economic interests is the source of permanent instability that constantly threatens to, and regularly does, explode into warfare. As long as this system remains, the threat of wars like the one that has broken out between Russia and Georgia hangs over humanity.

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Georgia, they invaded Southern Ossetia (which was technically part of Georgia but effectively independent since the time of the Soviet breakup). When tens of thousands of refugees fled into Russia, Russia stepped in. Which isn't to say Russia is blameless, and I'm sure they have done lots of horrible things in this conflict (war is hell) but I think it's pretty clear that Georgia started it.

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Originally posted by josh:
Sakashvilli, and his effort to "Georgianize" the two regions in dispute.

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August 21, 2008
And None Dare Call It Treason—McCain Advisor's Georgia Connection

By Patrick J. Buchanan

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.
.....

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...."

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[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

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Pat Buchanan: A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital important interests of the United States. It’s 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.

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Who Started Cold War II?

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"But enhancing strategic missile defense is more than just an endless barrel of pork. It is also a profoundly destabilizing policy that is essentially strategically aggressive. To understand how enhancing a "defense" capability can be an aggressive strategy, it is necessary to comprehend the Cold War issue of mutually assured destruction that most people under the age of 30 have probably had little cause to consider.
[...]

All these realities remain as true as they ever were, but in the climate of the post-Soviet period, the worst consequences of US abrogation of the ABM treaty were not immediately felt. Russia was in no condition to compete with the US, and indeed was probably quite ready to concede broad US global leadership, if the US had chosen to treat Russia with respect in turn. In these circumstances, a nuclear arms race was not forthcoming, and there was no real threat of a war between the US and Russia. Although the Russians pointed out the well known problems of missile defenses (see for instance Foreign Affairs, September/October 2000: "The Missile-Defense Mistake: Undermining Strategic Stability and the ABM Treaty" by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov), their objections were brushed aside...."

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Missile Defense

[ 24 August 2008: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

Nuclear Chicken in Poland: Putin Can't Afford to Back Down

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If the Bush administration proceeds with its plan to deploy its Missile Defense System in Poland, Russian Prime Minister Putin will be forced to remove it militarily. He has no other option. The proposed system integrates the the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border. It's no different than Khrushchev's plan to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s.

Early last year, at a press conference that was censored in the United States, Putin explained his concerns about Bush's plan:

“Once the missile defense system is put in place it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States. It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability....And, for the first time in history---and I want to emphasize this---there will be elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security…..Of course, we have to respond to that.”

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Originally posted by Malcolm French, APR:
Question: Who's responsible . . . Georgia or Russia.

Answer: Yes.

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Quite a few on the left believe that world-wide sympathies for the attack in New York on 9/11/01 has been hijacked in order to wage a phony war on terror by powerful rightwing interests with a history of terrorism second to none.