Understanding the battle for South Ossetia and how it matters to the West

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GrGr

Diamond Member
Sep 25, 2003
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Originally posted by: RightIsWrong
Originally posted by: Red Dawn
Fuck CHhcken Heart Cheney and the rest of the archaic Cold Warriors that inundate the current Administration, they were played and punked by Putin and the Russians big time.

I liked the vid of Bush and Putin at the Olympics.

Putin had this look on his face of "Fvck you, you little twerp. I could have you killed in your sleep and not lose a wink of sleep myself. Who are you to tell me how to run a military engagement?"

Another 'cartoon'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl...hlol?picture=336501043
 

jonks

Lifer
Feb 7, 2005
13,918
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?The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe is over,? Zalmay Khalilzad, US envoy

But as to the rest of the world, look out!
 

GrGr

Diamond Member
Sep 25, 2003
3,204
0
76
If the West is going to spank Russia anyway, Russia might as well remove Georgia as an effective player in the NATO/Oil game and link up with Iran directly.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven. Why did Saakashvili attack the Russian Red Army with his puny 10,000 troops and a few tanks? The way Cheney et al are screeching makes me think this is part of a broader move. Especially as it looks possible the US/EU will impose a blockade on Iran, with increased Navy presence in the Gulf, and turn the phony war there into a hot one. If there is an attack on Iran during Bush's time it will be now with maximum US forces in the region.
 

Buck Armstrong

Platinum Member
Dec 17, 2004
2,015
1
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Originally posted by: eskimospy
Originally posted by: Buck Armstrong

Yeah, I'm not talking about the usual forum pissing match about why nobody can possibly fight the almighty US, blah blah blah. We've heard all that armchair crap before...so why haven't we "won" in Iraq? Hint: its absolutely NOT because we are incapable of conquering that country.

And you answered your own question about "going big". Check your numbers again; its all relative, Einstein...and Russia does not intend to occupy Georgia...so you do the math.

As for occupations, contrary to popular internet opinion, history does not prove that occupations can't work. It only proves that half-ass occupations don't work. So compare our occupations of Germany and Japan to our current gigs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now you tell me...what's the difference?

The differences between the occupations of Iraq and Germany/Japan have very little to do with the levels of troops used in the occupation.

:confused:

That's just ridiculous. Sure, it wasn't the only factor, but its certainly an important one. In fact, that's such an utterly dumb statement to make that I have to doubt whether you even believe that, or you were just at a loss to come up with another answer.

If you do think that, please go crack a military history book before posting anymore on the subject. Or maybe even an elementary school math textbook would do.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
85,586
50,771
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Originally posted by: Buck Armstrong
Originally posted by: eskimospy

The differences between the occupations of Iraq and Germany/Japan have very little to do with the levels of troops used in the occupation.

:confused:

That's just ridiculous. Sure, it wasn't the only factor, but its certainly an important one. In fact, that's such an utterly dumb statement to make that I have to doubt whether you even believe that, or you were just at a loss to come up with another answer.

If you do think that, please go crack a military history book before posting anymore on the subject. Or maybe even an elementary school math textbook would do.

Look who thinks he's an expert. You think the populations of Germany and Japan were so compliant that not a single US soldier was killed by enemy action while occupying there had to do with US force levels? It had to do with a relatively homogenous ethnic situation and willing collaboration by the population totally devastated by war.

That doesn't mean that troop levels didn't help things along, they certainly did. They helped control crime, things like that however, not prevent the formation of an insurgency for which there was no support in either country. If somehow you thought that I was speaking to the relatively lower levels of internal strife between groups in Germany and Japan compared to now, then you would be correct that troop levels were an important distinction. If you were talking about the generalized resistance in Iraq and the complete absence of one in Germany and Japan like I think you were, then you're full of shit.
 

Buck Armstrong

Platinum Member
Dec 17, 2004
2,015
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Originally posted by: eskimospy
Look who thinks he's an expert. You think the populations of Germany and Japan were so compliant that not a single US soldier was killed by enemy action while occupying there had to do with US force levels? It had to do with a relatively homogenous ethnic situation and willing collaboration by the population totally devastated by war.

That doesn't mean that troop levels didn't help things along, they certainly did. They helped control crime, things like that however, not prevent the formation of an insurgency for which there was no support in either country. If somehow you thought that I was speaking to the relatively lower levels of internal strife between groups in Germany and Japan compared to now, then you would be correct that troop levels were an important distinction. If you were talking about the generalized resistance in Iraq and the complete absence of one in Germany and Japan like I think you were, then you're full of shit.

I don't have to be an expert to know that more troops definitely increase an occupation's chances of success. That doesn't mean you still can't fuck it up, of course, but as you said, it certainly does help with some of the exact things we screwed up in Iraq (like preventing crime, looting, and "private" internal warfare). In any case, reading your last post (above), it appears that we're actually in agreement on that point, so I'll just leave it at that.

As for the lack of "generalized resistance", now you're getting warm. What I meant was that in the case of Germany and Japan, we pretty much annihilated their armed forces entire (army, navy, air) before we occupied their countries, which tends to make it more difficult to form a hard-core, organized, numerous insurgency for various reasons (loss of command and control structures; lack of military-trained personnel, and/or of experienced fighting men between certain ages; lack of arms, equipment, vehicles, etc.; and so on).

On the rest of your last paragraph, I'm not quite clear what you're saying. If I had to guess, you mean that "relatively lower levels of internal strife" also contributed to the difference between Germany/Japan and Iraq, to which I'd definitely agree. Germany and Japan were united, advanced, first-world powers going into the war, and Iraq was not. Certainly the internal sectarian rivalry has contributed immensely to the chaos...so if that was your point, then I'm with you.
 

db

Lifer
Dec 6, 1999
10,575
292
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Dick Cheney: the nearly insane asshole who will get YOU into a fight while he watches from a very safe distance. And he will win the bet.
 

Buck Armstrong

Platinum Member
Dec 17, 2004
2,015
1
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Originally posted by: db
Dick Cheney: the nearly insane asshole who will get YOU into a fight while he watches from an undisclosed location and takes five deferments because although he loves war, he has "other priorities" than serving in the military. And he will shoot you in the face.

Fixed.
 

AzN

Banned
Nov 26, 2001
4,112
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Originally posted by: Duwelon
Originally posted by: JS80
Watch China do same thing to Taiwan once they see US do nothing to back Georgia.

If China knew they could get away with it i'm sure they would. China attacking Taiwan tho would be virtually like attacking Hawaii or California at this point considering the technology imports we get from there.

Get people like Obama and his ilk into power, who thinks his smile can help 0.000001% to defuse dictators, and China will get Taiwan by force eventually.

It's not like USA doesn't get so much stuff from China already.

People of Taiwan are Chinese. It is nothing more than internal issues.
 

senseamp

Lifer
Feb 5, 2006
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Kosovo was a horrible precedent that will lead to nothing but trouble. Before it was crystal clear, don't change borders with military action. Now, its basically discretionary. If you have big friends to fight for you, you too can secede.
The fact is that NATO and the so called peace loving Europeans set this precedent that will probably unleash a lot of territorial conflicts that would have been frozen. Russia warned over and over that recognizing Kosovo's independence will set a precedent which it will follow. It was completely ignored by nearsighted bureaucrats in NATO and Europe, but now they too will have to live with the consequences of their folly.
 
Feb 16, 2005
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Fine, answer it with the bush tequila twins enlisting and heading right over. Cheney, you can still defer your fat, old ass out of it, just like Nam, but probably can't knock up your wife again.
 

fstime

Diamond Member
Jan 18, 2004
4,382
5
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Originally posted by: Nebor
Originally posted by: GrGr
Originally posted by: Perry404
Originally posted by: MadRat
Russia didn't fair too well last time they tried to intervene in the region. Don't expect Georgia to roll over easily. I expect Georgia to nick Russia a thousand times for the trouble of giving Georgia a proverbial charlie horse.

I think Russia will turn Georgia into a wasteland before it gives up another inch of soil.

Yep, most likely Russia will do what Israel did to Lebanon.

Seems to be what's happening here. Russia is using lots of tanks, strategic bombers and ballistic missiles against civilian targets in Georgia. And these are innocent civilians, not Palestinians or terrorists.

Wow....
 

JS80

Lifer
Oct 24, 2005
26,271
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Originally posted by: Nebor
Originally posted by: GrGr
Originally posted by: Perry404
Originally posted by: MadRat
Russia didn't fair too well last time they tried to intervene in the region. Don't expect Georgia to roll over easily. I expect Georgia to nick Russia a thousand times for the trouble of giving Georgia a proverbial charlie horse.

I think Russia will turn Georgia into a wasteland before it gives up another inch of soil.

Yep, most likely Russia will do what Israel did to Lebanon.

Seems to be what's happening here. Russia is using lots of tanks, strategic bombers and ballistic missiles against civilian targets in Georgia. And these are innocent civilians, not Palestinians or terrorists.

:confused: why are you capitalizing the "p"?
 

HeXploiT

Diamond Member
Jun 11, 2004
4,359
1
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Superpower swoop
What Russia and America are really doing in Georgia and who set the trap? Vladimir Putin and his thuggish FSB pals or Dick Cheney and his equally unflappable neocon friends?


Georgia's decision to seize large parts of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, on the evening of 7 August was a disastrous political miscalculation, even in an era that is increasingly defined by spectacularly poor judgement.

Within three days of the assault, Russian forces had responded by in effect neutralising Georgia's military capacity, which President Mikhail Saakashvili's government in Tbilisi had spent several years and considerable sums of money building up.

Clearly, Russia has been goading and provoking the Georgian government for several years into making the big mistake. The parastates of Abkhazia and, above all, South Ossetia, have been under the control of a toxic coalition of criminals and both former and serving FSB officers. Russian soldiers have been acting as their protectors under the guise of a peacekeeping mission, preventing Georgia's attempts to seek a negotiated reintegration of the two areas. The Georgian crisis has benefited the standing of hardliners in Moscow, still aggrieved at Vladimir Putin's decision to place the moderate, business-friendly Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin.

But under the influence of an energetic neo-con lobby in Washington, and with considerable support from Israeli weapons manufacturers and military trainers, Saakashvili and the hawks around him came to believe the farcical proposition that Georgia's armed forces could take on the military might of their northern neighbour in a conventional fight and win.

The Georgian minister for reintegration of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Temur Yakobash vili, revealed the depth of the illusion the day after the conflict broke out when he thanked Israel for its assistance in training Georgian troops. "Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers," Yakobashvili said, with reference to Defensive Shield, the private company run by Gal Hirsch, a former general in the Israel Defence Forces.

Still unaware of what was really happening on the battlefield, Yakobashvili reported that a small group of Georgian soldiers had been able to wipe out an entire Russian military division, thanks to the Israeli training. "We killed 60 Russian soldiers yesterday alone," he said. "The Russians have lost more than 50 tanks, and we have shot down 11 of their planes. They have sustained enormous damage in terms of manpower."

Warned off

The Russians, of course, knew all about Defensive Shield and the tens of millions of dollars worth of Israeli military equipment that Georgia had been purchasing. Just over a week before the conflict erupted, Putin put in a call to the Israeli president, Shimon Peres. His message, according to a western intelligence source, was simple: "Pull out your trainers and weapons or we will escalate our co-operation with Syria and Iran." Peres does not suffer the same illusions as Georgian ministers and the Israeli set-up left Tbilisi within two days.

The KGB has also been tracking Georgia's clandestine arms procurement in Ukraine (where most weapons dealers work for Russian intelligence anyhow). The Russian army was also fully briefed about the joint US-Georgian manoeuvres, which took place in Georgia last month. Russia was not taking a military risk when responding to the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali - Moscow knew the precise contours of its enemy's capability. David's victory over Goliath was sensational because of its rarity - in the real world Goliath always comes out on top.

So the Russians set a trap and, prodded by Dick Cheney's people, Georgia walked right into it.

The consequences of this egregious error begin in Georgia itself. Not only is it now defenceless, it can kiss goodbye to any restoration of sovereignty over both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Even though President Sarkozy of France received tentative agreement from both Moscow and Tbilisi for the establishment of international talks to settle the status of the two areas, they are unlikely to rejoin Georgia any time soon. The loss of Abkhazia, with its considerable economic potential, is a huge blow.

The EU and the US will argue that there is no parallel to be drawn between Kosovo and the Georgian breakaway regions. But that is not how much of the world, including China, South Africa and Indonesia, see it. And it is not how Russia sees it. The first chickens of Kosovo's independence are coming home to roost.

Saakashvili is now very vulnerable. The Russian invasion has cut communications between Tbilisi and the main port in Poti. BP has closed down the pipeline running from Baku to Ceyhan in Turkey through Tbilisi, and Georgian banks are freezing all loans and blocking capital flight.

After only a week, the Georgian economy is teetering. "It doesn't look very good for Georgia," Edward Parker from the credit rating agency Fitch told the Moscow Times. "Going to war with Russia is bad for your creditworthiness, to put it mildly." And if the wheels do come off the economy, it is hard to see how Saakashvili might salvage his political position - such a combination of economic distress and military defeat is usually fatal. If he goes, Georgia is likely to fracture politically into a variety of fiefdoms familiar from the 1990s and living standards will plummet.

There is one faint consolation. The west may be impotent when it comes to responding to the situation militarily but it can rally round by offering the country a financial and commercial lifeline.

The foreign implications of the error are graver still. Russia is placing a marker on Ukraine. Do not, Moscow says, even think of allowing Ukraine into Nato, otherwise what we have seen in Georgia will be child's play. So the west will have to think hard how to play Ukraine's application to join the military alliance.

This in turn has accentuated the divisions within the European Union between those countries, including Germany, which remain cautious about a course of open confrontation with Russia, and Britain, which has echoed calls from Washington demanding that Russia's application to join the World Trade Organisation be reconsidered. Speaking from Tbilisi, one senior European diplomat told me that the split on this issue, which was openly on display at the Nato Bucharest summit in April, "is running deeper within the EU than was the case in the run-up to Iraq".

But the Georgian fiasco has implications for politics in the Middle East, the European Union and the United States.

For the Bush administration (or for its hawks at least), the Georgian mistake presents an opportunity - let us recast Russia as a threat to global stability and a potential enemy. Predictably, the toughest response to the Russian invasion came from Cheney. The outbreak of the crisis coincided with President Bush horseplaying with beach volleyball players in Beijing and the vice-president was in operational control at the time.

Cheney immediately announced that the Russian invasion cannot go "unanswered", a choice of words that the American former ambassador to Nato Robert Hunter described as "inflammatory". Cheney has been spoiling for a fight with the Russians for a couple of years, and he and his allies have seized upon Georgia's and Ukraine's stated aim to join Nato as a way of riling Moscow.

This plan came unstuck at the Bucharest summit, when some European countries, led by Germany, blocked the Nato road map for the two former Soviet republics. But the final statement did concede that the two countries' aspirations would eventually be met at some unspecified time in the future.

As a democratic country, Georgia has every right to apply for Nato membership, even though its inability to assert its sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia presents a problem to some existing Nato members. But the neocons in Washington have been pushing Georgian and Ukrainian membership as a critical goal for the maintenance of the western alliance. By cranking up the dispute with Russia over Nato, Cheney is shifting the political debate in the US away from the state of the economy and towards the issue of national security.

Global dangers

If the presidential election is fought on the former issue, Barack Obama is a shoo-in. But if the central issue is national security and who would be best at dealing with a major crisis like Georgia, then his Republican opponent, John McCain, has to be favourite. McCain's response to Georgia was almost as tough as Cheney's, explained in part by the fact that until May this year his chief foreign policy adviser was working as a lobbyist for Saakashvili.

This political dynamic is driving the west towards a rift with Russia that will polarise a number of other issues, including policy towards Iran. On this latter matter, Russia has played a relatively constructive and, perhaps more importantly, a moderating role. In the next three months, the issues of Ukraine and Iran will loom large in global politics and they may well have a decisive impact on the outcome of the US election. Who set the trap in Georgia? Vladimir Putin and his thuggish pals from the FSB, or Dick Cheney and his equally unflappable neocon friends?

Whether Georgia was defeated by the Russians or lost by the neocons, a touch of diplomatic sobriety on both sides would be a welcome development, if the Georgian conflict is not to mark a very dangerous new phase in the development of global politics - serial confrontation between the west and Russia.
newstatesman
 

JS80

Lifer
Oct 24, 2005
26,271
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Hey it was only a matter of time Bush/Cheney and the jews were to be blamed for this war.
 

jman19

Lifer
Nov 3, 2000
11,220
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Originally posted by: JS80
Hey it was only a matter of time Bush/Cheney and the jews were to be blamed for this war.

Obviously.

What are the sources for this article?
 

rchiu

Diamond Member
Jun 8, 2002
3,846
0
0
Originally posted by: JS80
Hey it was only a matter of time Bush/Cheney and the jews were to be blamed for this war.

well, they are not blamed for starting the war. they are blamed for not able to do jack about it because of their stupid decision like Iraq war.
 

JS80

Lifer
Oct 24, 2005
26,271
7
81
Originally posted by: rchiu
Originally posted by: JS80
Hey it was only a matter of time Bush/Cheney and the jews were to be blamed for this war.

well, they are not blamed for starting the war. they are blamed for not able to do jack about it because of their stupid decision like Iraq war.

that opinion peace clearly implies that it was they that pushed Georgia into war.
 

jman19

Lifer
Nov 3, 2000
11,220
654
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Originally posted by: Ocguy31
Why does it seem like some people are happy that civilians are being wiped out? Sick sick people....

You mean people like senseamp? That's because he clearly has Russian interests in mind.
 

jman19

Lifer
Nov 3, 2000
11,220
654
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Originally posted by: Duwelon
Originally posted by: BarneyFife
The president of Georgia is a moron. I bet the US told him to invade and said we have your back. Little did they know the US pulls these kinds of stunts all the time. Bush told Saddam that he could have Kuwait and then pulled the rug underneath his feet. Same thing is happening with Georgia. When will these people learn? These fools thought they would get on the good side by providing troops little did they know you never do business with the US unless you want to get burned. Georgia not only got burned but now Russia is giving them a bitch slap. Sucks to be them but you don't poke a bear with a stick.

Lie much?

You're no saint yourself.

Anyway, Barney is delusional. Why would the US tell Saddam that he "could have Kuwait?"