Certainly, he’s adopted the Bush mantra, “Never tell the truth when a lie would do,” when he denies spending money lobbying the United States.
Dude, we have the paperwork filed by senior McCain adviser’s Randy Scheunemann’s company, Orion Strategies, showing the payments to them totaling 800 grand.
It appears that the Pakistanis have gotten a bit hot under the collar about US incursions, as they have just authorized firing on US troops if they cross the border:
“The orders are clear,” Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said in an interview. “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”
Jeff Stein of CQ politics, makes a very good point here, that Pakistan increasingly seems to resemble Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge.
There is one difference though, which Mr. Stein notes: Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
We are now seeing reports that Pakistani troops are firing on US troops, and the Pakistani military is saying that they repelled a US border incursion.
This is why it was so disasterous to take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. There was a limited window in which to act, and the window is at best rapidly closing at this time.
Gary Brecher makes a very good point, that the Neocons who are suggesting that Georgia needs to be reorganized along the lines of Hezbollah do not have the best interest of the Georgians at heart.
Rather, as the War Nerd so eloquently puts it, “America’s chickenhawks are ready to turn Georgia into a nation of missing-relative-seeking refugees.”:
I’m pretty sure if you asked any Georgians, they’d screech, “Agh! No! We don’t want to live like Hezbollah, cowering in our huts under constant bombardment, raising kids with no prospects but martyrdom!” But then the neocons haven’t asked anybody in Georgia. Safe in their living rooms, they think it’d be a great idea for Georgia, a very unwarlike little middle-class country, to try to imitate the Lebanese Shia who make up Hezbollah’s suicide squads.
It appears that Palin just went up to the border between Iraq and Kuwait, and then turned around and went home.
Lame.
Not surprisingly, we have Cheney visiting the region before slinking off to an undisclosed location, and he is very clear on the fact that he wants a new cold war for political advantage, NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine, and pretty much anyone else, if only because it pisses off the Russians. (see here, here, and here)
Of course, the Ukraine’s coalition government appears to be on the verge of collapse, and while Ukrainian President Yushchenko is still going for NATO membership, while PM Yulia Tymoshenko* is more cautious, and less viscerally anti-Russian (and anti-ethnic Russians in the Ukraine) than the president.
It also appears that while the Ukranians are interested in EU membership, support NATO membership is somewhat more tepid.
Even with that, there is no unanimity within the EU over Ukraine’s membership.
I’m not sure if this is because of concerns with Russia, because the Ukraine is really not ready in terms of things like transparency, or because the EU is already suffering from massive growing pains and transfer payments from it’s breakneck expansion of the past few years.
Meanwhile, NATO appears to be taking a leading role in the rebuilding of the Georgian military, with NATO networking with NATO radars and their early warning system.
Meanwhile, we have a pretty good rundown of Georgian misstatements and flat out lies about the war, and that Georgia had been planning its invasion of South Ossetia for many months, as evidenced by this story from April regarding the radars being moved into the conflict areas.
What is clear is that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was hoping to draw NATO into his war, which is a pretty good reason not to even begin considering EU or NATO membership for Georgia until it is clear that the firebrand politician has left the stage; he was engaging in nuclear chicken by proxy.
In any case it appears that the Russians are deescalating, with a promise to withdraw all troops from Georgia proper.
*Why, oh why can’t news happen in places where the names are easy to spell?
My first thought was that their might be a Chilean connection, since it was on 9/11 that Allende was assassinated, my second thought was that it was a Reichstag fire, and there were dozens, if not hundreds of other odd thoughts.
The oddest one, and the one that sticks with me was driving home.
I was taking the outer loop of the Baltimore Beltway (I-695), and at the junction with I-83, which sucks, I blew through in no time at all. There were perhaps a dozen other cars on my stretch of interstate, and I remember thinking, “So this is what it takes to fix the traffic here.”
Completely inappropriate, slightly demented, and it is the feeling that I still remember the most vividly.
I’m not sure if it’s just me that is weird, or all of humanity.
Well, it appears that the US claims of 5 to 7 civilians and 30+ militants have been pretty convincinbly disproven:
The Afghan government, human rights and intelligence officials, independent witnesses and a United Nations investigation back up their account, pointing to dozens of freshly dug graves, lists of the dead, and cellphone videos and other images showing bodies of women and children laid out in the village mosque.
Cellphone images seen by this reporter show at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among about 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the village mosque. Ten days after the airstrikes, villagers dug up the last victim from the rubble, a baby just a few months old. Their shock and grief is still palpable.
Not only is the lying stupid, but it’s an attempt to justify a policy that reinforces the support of the Taliban.
The Pentagon is recommending steady troop levels in Iraq, but Bush is looking at pulling troops from Iraq anyway, because, though it is left unsaid in the articles, it’s good for the elections.
Unsurprisingly, we have reports that Cheney to made promises to support Georgia while there.
Once again, Mr. Deferment is letting his mouth cut checks that someone else’s kids will have to cash.
No doubt he promised more welfare for American defense contractors to help rebuild their military, which the Georgians are reportedly very eager to do.
Additionally, it appears that once again, Cheney is determined to make another problem worse, as he is lobbying for the US terminating the civil nuclear cooperation pact with Russia, which is likely to mean more ill-secured nuclear material in that nation.
This isn’t to say that Russian diplomatic efforts are going well. They just got the kiss of death diplomatically, when Hugo Chavez of Venezuela backed the Russian recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Also, in the, “I thought that this has already happened,” category, we have Georgia severing diplomatic ties with Russia.
I think that the final word on this conflict comes from William Pfaff:
Ukraine and the Baltic states have been given the lesson that great powers do not go to war against other heavily armed great powers just to settle ancient sectarian quarrels or linguistic rivalries in client countries, even if those are prospective NATO members.
Meanwhile, Saakashvili is beginning to see domestic push-back from his failed adventure, with the opposition now saying that some of the blame lays in the, “US educated Georgian leader,” for the spanking received from the Russians.
Meanwhile, the EU has been unable to come to a consensus on any diplomatic actions to take, which is an indication that the EU does need a change in governance structure, just not the one that they are trying to ram down the throat of the Irish.
Russia remains completely unapologetic about the whole affair, which is not surprising, as over the top as some of the statements made by Moscow on the conflict are, it’s clear that this is a real statement of how Russia feels about both Georgia and NATO expansion.
While I am not as big a fan of delving into the minutiae of military conflicts analysis as, for example, the War Nerd, Aviation Week does have an interesting report on Russian self-analysis on what happened in Georgia. (paid subscription required)
Not surprisingly, the RuAF comes in for most of the criticism. There was apparently little preparation on their point, and no attempts to use long range PGWs to take out Georgian air defense systems.
First, Seumas Milne has a very good article noting that the US is no longer the “hyperpower” it was in the mid 1990s, and Russia just showed it in its recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The US military is too overstretched to do anything meaningful there, even if Russia did not have somewhere around 2000 nuclear warheads, and on the diplomacy side, countries now require an indication that it serves their national interests when they are asked to follow the US on a military adventure.
The US is still the only remaining world power, but Russia is one of a dozen or so regional powers who are now able to challenge the us in their regions.
In a very real way, it is the end of empire.
Russia has rebuilt its military into a credible fighting force over the past decade. 10 Years ago, the Georgian military would have still lost by dint of numbers, but they would have held out for weeks, and not collapsed in a day.
I will also note that I think that Putin believes it when he says that United States encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia. I believe it too, and I imagine that in a decade or so, we will have historians confirming the fact.
For what it’s worth, we now have evidence that diplomats don’t have to be Bush political appointees to be complete idiots, case in point, Daniel Fried, who is claiming that Russian military actions are a sign of weakness, “But being angry and seeking revanchist victory is not the sign of a strong nation. It is the sign of a weak one.”
So, that would make invading Iraq….What?
Meanwhile, the US military is looking at ways to rebuild the Georgian military, which strikes me as imprudent, at best.
It was the military aid which convinced the Georgians that they could start this military adventure in the first place.
The EU is warning Moscow to stay out of the Ukraine, but I really don’t think that Russia is looking at rolling up the Ukraine.
I could see that situation developing if a Ukrainian nationalist comes to power and starts trying to ethnically cleanse the region, but I don’t see anyone being stupid enough to do this…..At least no one on the scene right now is stupid enough.
That being said, the reaction of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) regarding the recognition of those provinces, where Russia is a member, was decidedly tepid, and the Asian former Soviet Republics who are its members (with China) are among those most likely to be supportive.
And in the comedy as foreign policy department, Georgia is calling for the UN Security Council to take action against Russia…..Ummmm….What part of “veto” don’t you understand?
For what it’s worth, we now have a report, albeit a self serving one from South Ossetia’s prosecutor general on the numbers of casualties from the initial Georgian assault, 1,692 killed.
I would take that with a serious grain of salt. It probably is more than the 130 stated by other sources though.
Kind of like “Dueling Banjos”, only it’s both Medvedev and Saakashvili, both writing an OP/ED for the Financial Times.
I think that they are both very sparing with the truth, but one sounds like a mealy mouthed politician, and the other sounds like a complete tie chewing nutjob.
These are both self serving statements from men, they are both less than completely frank.
One of them, however, sounds nuts.
We have NATO demanding that Russia rescind its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia without explaining why Kosovo is legal, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not.
Because I said so is not a good argument in foreign policy.
I think that China will wait, but that one or two of the FSU central Asian naations will go along.
Kosovo is refusing to back sovereignty, which is not surprising.
In terms of the purely legal aspects of the situation, they are very similarly, but the Kosovars were targeted with an organized campaign of Genocide, while the Georgians went with a brutal program of imperialism, and there is a difference morally.
In any case, the independence of Kosovo, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia are really more about the “great game” between the US and Nato and Russia than they are about concern for the people in those regions….on both sides.
Meanwhile, Serbia said, I told you so,” which is not unexpected.
Obviously, what makes the news in the US is that the USS McFaul delivered aid to Georgia, but in the grand scheme of things, that means very little.
I think of more import is that fact that Saakashvili is a nut-job relegated to chewing his own tie…Really…see the vid at end.
First, he is promissing to rebuild his army and retake South Ossetia and Abkhazia. That’s clearly not going to happen. Both areas will be declaring independence, and will be recognized by Russia, in the next 18 months, and probably before January 21.
We also have him flat out lying about the original Georgian offensive into South Ossetia, claiming that the Russians had already moved tanks in, and I honestly think that he believes that.
Certainly there are issues of provocations on both sides, but the idea that somehow Georgia was forced to invade South Ossetia and launch an artillery barrage on its capital has no relationship to reality.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the Georgian parliament has extended martial law, which I think at this point will be used against political opponents, and not either the Russian military or Ossetian or Abkhazian militias.
Interestingly enough this article in Newsweek provides some insight into the dynamics between Georgia and the West:
It would have been hard not to be charmed by Mikheil Saakashvili. Young, dynamic, Western-educated and -oriented, he was among the most intriguing characters to move onto the global stage after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
….
….Soon after, I met the president again at his newly built residence in Tbilisi. He had dark rings around his eyes and he alternated between enormous, if not misplaced confidence that his Western allies would help him, and rather childish despair about Russia’s view of him personally. He said he had heard that Russian officials play billiards with the word MISHA written on the black ball, and asked the reporters assembled at his home, “What is going on in Russia? Am I hated there?” That evening he seemed traumatized by this. With his head in his hands, and pear juice and brandy running down his chin, he pleaded: “Does anybody know what Russia is up to?”
This is Western Tribalism at it’s finest: He spoke good English. He went to an elite technical school, Columbia University, so despite the fact that he unleashed riot police on protesters, and seized opposition media outlets, he has to be a good guy.
We see the same thing in Iraq: The representatives of ISCI, a proxy for Iran, speak fluent English, and affect American manners, so they must be the representatives of western style democracy.
The West in general, and America in particular, must get over this little bit of chauvanism.
Perhaps the most extreme example of just how far this short-sightedness takes us is this piece of doggerel from Richard Holbrooke, who claims that somehow the Russians have lost because Saakashvili is still nominally in power, when it is clear that he is a dead man walking.
He is an indicator of just how morally and intellectually bankrupt the foreign policy establishment is in Washington, DC.
I’m sure that this will be resolved over the next few months, but the allegation that the French deaths in Afghanistan were the result of a NATO air strike play into everyone’s worst stereotypes.
10 French soldiers killed, and it appears that the Taliban is beginning a major offensive.
No doubt they will get the butts kicked, but it shows just how misguided we were to pull out to invade Iraq.
I stand by my earlier assessment, that the Russians are pulling out, but doing so with all deliberate slowness.
In any case, it does appear that the Russians are determined to humiliate the Georgians, and their state security apparatus, as much as possible on the way out.
They still seem to be messing around in the main Georgian port of Poti, and they are maintaining that, “A 1999 document written up by the Joint Control Commission, an international body that monitored tensions in South Ossetia, gives peacekeepers access to a long piece of land that extends about nine miles into Georgian territory.”
This is about showing who is boss, which is immature, but at least no shots are being fired right now.
That being said, the Russians are suffering some diplomatic blow-back, with Ukraine offering NATO access to a former Soviet missile early warning station, and Poland signing a deal on installing the US ABM system.
Certainly these will be more noticed by the Russians than what will be a temporary downgrade of NATO-Russian relations, which is not going to last long, if just because cooperation with them on Iran is essential.
We have an interesting quote in this article about the US capitulating on NATO membership for Georgia:
“Russia has successfully burned Georgia’s NATO card,” said Sarah E. Mendelson, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Whatever the outcome, Russia has all but obliterated Georgia’s possibility of joining NATO, as it cannot belong to this alliance if it has unresolved border disputes.”
Let’s be clear. The Russians won.
Russia says that it is pulling troops out of Georgia, though Pentagon sources are disputing this.
My guess is that there is a withdrawal going on, the Russians don’t want to deal with an insurgency, but that it is proceeding with all deliberate slowness.
Aviation Week has analysis of the relative success of Georgian air defense systems (Paid Subscription Required), specifically of the SU Tu-22M3, and suggest that it was shot down because of Israeli aid in upgrading the Soviet era air defense systems.
Additionally, they note that the Georgian air defense system was less sophisticated, less networked, and less automated than the Syrian one, and as such, it may have been less vulnerable to the cyber attacks that were allegedly used by the Israelis when they struck the Syrian reactor complex.
Shades of Battlestar Galactica, the new one, not the old one.
As to the Su-25 losses, they suggest that these were shoulder launched SAMs, and I agree, as the Su-25 is really a close air support aircraft, which puts them in the sweet spot of such weapons.
Writing at the Danger room, Galrahn notes the unbelievably rapid response time of the Russian navy to the invasion of South Ossetia.
Basically, the Black Sea fleet would have to have gotten underway within an hour of the invasion to make the time line.
The Russians knew that the attack was coming, and they knew when it was coming.
The FSB, or some other Russian TLA has thoroughly penetrated the Georgian security establishment.
First, it appears that there is evidence of looting and burning by South Ossetian militias. It’s unclear how much of this is ethnic violence, and how much is simple opportunism.
The Russians are not doing a whole bunch about this right now, they are busy destroying the Georgian security infrastructure under their control, but it does appear that they have arrested some militia men.
This does parallel what happened in Kosovo following the expulsion of the Serbian army, though with the Russians in control, it’s likely to get worse than it was in Kosovo with NATO troops who were somewhat less tolerant of the activities of the KLA post liberation.
Meanwhile, Serbia is lobbying the UN to refer the matter of Serbian independence to the International Court of Justice, which is awkward for the US, who has to argue that Kosovo can and should be independent, but that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should not be.