Facts:
George Bush once again misused his office as the head of the world's greatest superpower and helped start another war.
How?
Well, bear with me here.
On the one hand, Bush gave the Georgians every impression that he would back them up, even militarily, if they were to "deal with" their troublesome areas such as South Ossetia.
From Democracy Now, and an interview with Col. Sam Gardiner:
(audio stream is here). (I found the transcript here)
Here is the money quote, the one I want to emphasize:
The United States made some errors when it left the impression with the Georgians that our support somehow meant they were free to undertake this operation. That was clearly a bad idea that we communicated with them.
Yes, the U.S. has been egging the Georgian government along this whole time, urging them to take the actions they have, and promising to back them up if they were to undertake this operation. Now Russia has come in with literally all guns blazing and now the Georgians are up a very dirty creek.
How bad can this situation get? Well, pretty freaking bad. Here's more from Col. Gardiner:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about significance of this, in terms of nuclear warfare in Russia? Do we have anything to fear along those lines?
COL. SAM GARDINER: Absolutely. Let me just say that if you were to rate how serious the strategic situations have been in the past few years, this would be above Iraq, this would be above Afghanistan, and this would be above Iran.
On little notice to Americans, the Russians learned at the end of the first Gulf War that they couldn’t—they didn’t think they could deal with the United States, given the value and the quality of American precision conventional weapons. The Russians put into their doctrine a statement, and have broadcast it very loudly, that if the United States were to use precision conventional weapons against Russian troops, the Russians would be forced to respond with tactical nuclear weapons. They continue to state this. They practice this in their exercise. They’ve even had exercises that very closely paralleled what went on in Ossetia, where there was an independence movement, they intervene conventionally to put down the independence movement, the United States and NATO responds with conventional air strikes, they then respond with tactical nuclear weapons.
It appears to me as if the Russians were preparing themselves to do that in this case. First of all, I think they believe the United States was going to intervene. At a news conference on Sunday, the deputy national security adviser said we have noted that the Russians have introduced two SS-21 medium-range ballistic missile launchers into South Ossetia. Now, let me say a little footnote about those. They’re both conventional and nuclear. They have a relatively small conventional warhead, however. So, the military significance, if they were to be conventional, was almost trivial compared to what the Russians could deliver with the aircraft that they were using to strike the Georgians.
I think this was a signal. I think this was an implementation on their part of their doctrine. It clearly appears as if they expected the United States to do what they had practiced in their exercises. In fact, this morning, the Russians had an air defense exercise in the southern part of Russia that borders Georgia in which they—it was practicing shooting down incursion aircraft that were incursion into Russia. They were prepared for the United States to intervene, and I think they were prepared—or at least they were wanting to show the United States that their doctrine of the use of tactical nuclear weapons, if the US attacks, was serious, and they needed to take—the United States needs to take Russia very seriously.
Okay, so that's one major, murderous blunder (thousands of people have been slaughtered in only a few days in this disaster thus far -- gee, thanks GWB).
Now for the other blunder. A kossack here last night posted a fascinating 2005 article from The Asia Times which is an awesome primer for anyone interested in the region and this conflict.
And in this article we are reminded of a rather bizarre (even for Bush standards) speech that Bush gave while visiting Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia:
In this context, it's worth noting that Bush himself made a trip to Tbilisi on May 10 to address a crowd in Freedom Square, promoting his latest war on tyranny campaign for the region. He praised the US-backed "color revolutions" from Ukraine to Georgia. Bush went on to attack Franklin D Roosevelt's Yalta division of Europe in 1945. He made the curious declaration, "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," the president said. "We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others." Bush continued, "Now, across the Caucasus, in Central Asia and the broader Middle East, we see the same desire for liberty burning in the hearts of young people. They are demanding their freedom - and they will have it."
Not surprisingly, that speech was read as a "go" signal for opposition groups across the Caucasus.
(Somehow I'm reminded of Bush's father, who told an ambassador named April Glaspie to let Saddam Hussein know that the United States would look the other way if Saddam were to invade Kuwait.)
So to recap -- GW Bush one the one hand urged these autonomous areas to push for independence, and on the other hand told Georgia to go ahead and crack down on them.
And then seemed to be caught with his pants down when Russia invaded.
Or was this part of the plan the whole time? We'll probably never know. Bush and Cheney have a way of making "getting exactly what they want" to look like a result of idiocy and incompetence.
The big Elephant in the Room that most people aren't talking about is discussed at length in the Asia Times article linked above. That is the oil and natural gas of the region, and the pipelines that ship the stuff hither and yon, and who controls them.
The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline was originally proclaimed by BP and others as the project of the century. Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was a consultant to BP during the Bill Clinton era, urging Washington to back the project. In fact, it was Brzezinski who went to Baku in 1995, unofficially, on behalf of Clinton, to meet with then-Azeri president Haidar Aliyev, to negotiate new independent Baku pipeline routes, including what became the BTC pipeline.
Brzezinski also sits on the board of an impressive, if little-known, US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC). The chairman of USACC in Washington is Tim Cejka, president of ExxonMobil Exploration. Other USACC board members include Henry Kissinger and James Baker III, the man who in 2003 personally went to Tbilisi to tell Eduard Shevardnadze that Washington wanted him to step aside in favor of the US-trained Georgian president Mikhail Shaakashvili. Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to George H W Bush, also sits on the board of USACC. And Cheney was a former board member before he became vice president. A more high-powered Washington team of geopolitical fixers would be hard to imagine. This group of prominent individuals certainly would not give a minute of their time unless an area was of utmost geopolitical strategic importance to the US or to certain powerful interests there.
Now that the BTC pipeline to Ceyhan is complete, a phase 2 pipeline is in consideration undersea, potentially to link the Caspian to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan with its rich gas reserves, directing that energy away from China to the West in a US-UK-controlled route.
Russia isn't happy about this pipeline, or about any of the others proposed in the former Soviet bloc countries, because Russia currently supplies a whole lot of oil and natural gas to Europe. These new, U.S. backed pipelines are bad for their business, and their power.
If Russia goes after the Baku-Cehyan pipeline, and it seems they've already tried to bomb it once, sending 50 missiles its way, there's no telling what will happen. The members of the United States - Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (formerly headed by Dick Cheney, until he became VP) will be VERY upset about this.
My point: This hornet's nest was stirred up, very deliberately, by the Bush administration. Whether out of sheer incompetence (unlikely, IMO) or by design, only time will tell.