Currently the mainstream media and our politicians are busy lambasting Russia for its invasion of Georgia. I feel the need to point out a lengthy stream of reasons why they have no right to be critical of Russia in this matter.
1. Georgia started it. The regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have been self-ruled since no more than 4 years after Georgia itself gained independence. Georgia invaded viciously in a surprise attack timed perfectly to coincide with the beginning of the Olympics. And with incredible audacity, Georgia's U.S. educated leader Mikhail Saakashvili claims that Russia, who merely responded to the Georgian aggression, timed it all that way.
2. Georgia is denying the right of South Ossetia to secede, even though it is itself nothing more than a secessionist state... a former Russian republic that was ruled by Russia for most of the past 200 years until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia let Georgia secede without a major invasion, but now Georgia refuses to recognize the right of secession for South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Why does one have the right to secession but not the other?
3. The people Georgia killed when it invaded had sought and been granted Russian citizenship. Let's repeat that... Georgia attacked and killed hundreds, maybe thousands of Russian citizens. Are you going to tell me that the U.S. wouldn't have reacted if its own citizens had been killed?
4. Our politicians, particularly our ignoble President, keep insisting that Russia should be restrained in its violent action in Georgia... but did we behave that way when Serbs attacked Muslims in Yugoslavia? Not in the least. We bombed the country into submission and put its leader on trial for war crimes. We still pursue Serbian war criminals to this day.
5. Our politicians have also presented Russia with an offer of a cease-fire signed by Georgia, which the Russians have rejected. Is this a sign of barbarity on their part? No more so than the U.S. actively working to delay a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon during Israel's second war with that country, while Israel dropped 3 million cluster bombs on primarily residential areas... cluster bombs which remain as unexploded ordnance and still kill people to this day, as they will far into the future.
6. Our President, whose memory must be horribly defective, has also stated that Russia's invasion of Georgia is in violation of international law and cannot stand in the 21st century. He must have forgotten that his own invasion of Iraq, a country he has destroyed and occupied for years while allowing U.S. corporations to profiteer there at will fits the very same description.
7. By the way, where was all this concern when Russia was beating up on Muslim separatists in Chechnya? I guess that once again, the West demonstrates that it doesn't care about Muslim lives as much as Christian lives... or maybe the only reason that the West is concerned with this at all is that it's been desperate to get its hands on the regions oil via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which British Petroleum has invested so heavily in for years now, a pipeline which runs straight through Georgia and is threatened by Russia's invasion. A pipeline, by the way, which carries about 1% of the world's oil supply... sounds small, but it ain't.
8. Russia has watched as the U.S. has worked for years since the Reagan era to carve away at its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, encouraging various states to build greater ties with the West, even encouraging them to enter NATO, and finally Russia's sway has eroded right to its doorstep. But when the U.S. and Israel each have "advisors" in Georgia training Georgian troops to fight, and both the U.S. and Israel are selling arms to Georgia, and Georgia's military budget has multiplied by a factor of 30 in the last year, and the U.S. is proposing "missile defense shields" in Eastern Europe which are clearly aimed not at stopping an Iranian attack but at neutralizing Russia's arsenal, enough is enough. Russia gave us a perfect opportunity many years ago to defuse their suspicions of our activities. Vladimir Putin suggested at one point that Russia itself might want to enter NATO. We issued a point-blank refusal, but we seem to want to let everyone else in. What is Russia to think? Even the "economic advisors" we sent to them to "help" when their economy crashed did nothing but loot the country. How can they see our presence on their border as anything but a direct threat?
9. Did I mention that bit about the West not valuing Muslim lives as much as Christian lives? That might be why the West gets in a tizzy over Russia's invasion, but doesn't care at all about the U.S. encouraging, advising and assisting in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, which has lasted for quite some time now and which it seems was caused by little more than Ethiopia getting irritated that it might have another Muslim state on its border if the Islamic Courts Militia succeeded in overthrowing the remnants of the government and putting down the very same warlords we fought against back when we launched our "humanitarian" invasion of Somalia which resulted in the "Black Hawk Down" incident in which the body of a U.S. pilot was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by an angry mob. So Ethiopia has come to the rescue of those warlords, and we're encouraging them to do so. Which means we are now indirectly supporting the warlords responsible for keeping that country in a state of chaos and defiling the corpse of one of our soldiers. Prior to the Ethiopian invasion, by the way, the Islamic Courts Militia had brought a relative peace to most of the country. It is now back to its normal state of violence and appalling human suffering. The U.S. media basically ignores it, because they prefer to criticize things for which we can blame someone else, no matter how implausibly.
10. Oh, and for all the talk about how unrestrained Russia's response to the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia has been, earlier today a news report on tv stated that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is still intact. So obviously the Russians are showing some degree of restraint. Especially since they haven't razed Tbilisi to the ground, nor even entered it since I last checked, unlike what the Georgian forces have reportedly done to the South Ossetian capital city of Tskhinvali. In THAT city, I have read that 98% of the buildings have been damaged and bodies are strewn about the streets. The city is basically destroyed. By any standard the area of South Ossetia has been crippled. Are we to accept that Georgia should be able to do this with impunity and simply withdraw to Tbilisi until Russian anger subsides? To what purpose? To attack again later? I think not. That's simply not a reasonable expectation.
And for those who want to know how interconnected our world conflicts are, the outbreak of this war in Georgia is going to directly affect our troops in Iraq. Georgia supplies the 3rd largest contingent of troops in the "coalition of the willing"... about 2000 troops. They are currently being airlifted home at full speed to deal with the conflict there. That means that 2000 troops, probably American, have to be scrounged up to cover for them. Or maybe we're just going to delay the scheduled withdrawal of 2000 troops we were planning to bring home. Or I guess we could just go without them. After all, that's what we did before, right?
So if you're inclined to condemn this conflict simply because you condemn all such conflicts, fine... but might I suggest you get your own house in order first? After all, we in the U.S. are involved in conflicts all around the world, and much more extensive and brutal ones than the one Russia is currently involved in. If you start complaining about the Russians but neglect to mention that we set the standard for careless, aggressive military activity in the modern age and the Russians are simply following our lead, you haven't got a moral leg to stand on. And if you just like bashing the Russians because you think it's patriotic and it's "my country right or wrong", then you're clearly just a Republican who's too scared to sign an enlistment form... I hope you didn't have any delusions about that.
As for me, I'm going to sit back, watch this mess unfold, hope that it ends as soon as possible but respect the Russian right to act under these circumstances and cease blowing up Georgia when they see fit rather than at the behest of the hypocritical and oil-mongering aggressive Western nations, and insistently point out to anyone concerned that the Russians are doing nothing at the moment that we would not ourselves have done in similar circumstances, and that our own flaws at the moment are far more egregious than their own. I will NOT drink the Kool-Aid, I will NOT accept the anti-Russian hysteria that our government and media and ill-educated armchair "patriots" of our country have begun to insistently yammer on about like a bunch of Chihuahuas on meth and which clearly will only get louder in the coming days. As I see it, this conflict is simply not our business and our involvement there is both a mistake and the primary cause of the current situation.