Update: the information from Geiiga (in comments below) that Karl Rove made a special trip to the Crimea recently provides further evidence of the correctness of this analysis.
My last diary analyzed the likelihood that the attack on Ossetia was a classic "Wag the Dog" scenario, with the war being unleashed by Cheney to whip up good old war hysteria and bolster sorry Republican chances.
Target No. 1 of the Ossetia Attack: Obama.
The majority of Kossack poll participants agreed with the analysis.
Well it looks like at least one of Russia's leading political analysts agrees.
In today's Izvestia , one of the top 3 Russian newspapers, there is an analysis of the situation by Sergei Markov, director of the Political Studies Institute.
Here's the link to the Izvestia article.
Since I cannot just refer most of you, dear Kossacks, to the Russian version, I will need to provide translated quotations at length.
First he starts out bluntly:
The political mechanism that led to war in South Ossetia has
now become more or less clear. The chief initiator of this plan is
Dick Cheney.
After a brief explanation of Cheney, the neocons, and McCain, he goes on to point out their central problem:
John McCain is losing to Barack Obama....McCain's one area of advantage, national security... and therefore the leadership of the neocons decided to force the Americans to vote not for the presidential candidate who will save the economy - but for the president who is the potential Chief Commanding Officer.
For this a war is needed.
The US have provided massive military aid to Georgia, indeed 70% of the company's budget was dedicated to the military. Tiny Georgia was, absurdly, our third-largest military ally in Iraq. Saakashvili is totally dependent on the USA for his security, and will to anything Bush or Cheney says.
In Being Bush called on Saakashvili to return to the August 6 borders, but why make such a show to the world when he could have just picket up the phone and told Saakashvili to retreat, indeed not to invade at all.
Markov:
It's clear that if previously the Americans had fobidden him from starting a war in Ossetia, that now they ordered him to start it....the goal was to provoke Russia to military action. Next to roll out an anti-Russian hysteria, try to imitate a new "Cold War" between the West and Russia and to elect McCain on this wave. This makes the timing of the war clear, August 2008 at the very start of the main presidential campaign.
Because this wasn't Saakashvili's initiative, we can expect other provocations against Russia will follow from Washington's satellites.
Markov has faith that ordinary Europeans will be outraged when they figure this out and wake up, driving another wedge between them and the USA.
Finally, his analysis concurs with mine down to the detail that the very day (August 8) was not at all in Saakashvili's interest, but was the tell-tale clue that it was Cheney: just to stick it in the eye to China and show who was really master in this world.
I'd like to end with a crucial quote from George Kennan, the father of "containment" on Feb. 5, 1997, he wrote in a NYT op-ed:
that the Clinton administration's decision to back an enlargement of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to bring it to the borders of Russia was a terrible mistake. He wrote that "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era."
"Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking,"
We have been reaping the Clinton/Albright harvest since 1999, but only now are we really beginning to realize it.