I have been following it from the moment it started. First, the important facts:
- The Osetin are a completely different people from the Georgians. They entered the Russian Empire about two centuries ago completely separately from the Georgians. The only reason why part of their territory was included inside the contemporary borders of Georgia is through the lobbying of Georgian apparatchiks in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the 20th century.
When the USSR collapsed, the Osetin refused to accept Georgian jurisdiction and pushed to rejoin Russia (the other half of their territory, North Osetia, is already inside Russia). In the early 90s, they already fought one war against Georgia. At the time, Georgia was ruled by the extreme nationalist Zviad Gamsahurdia, who committed numerous atrocities against Osetia and Abhazia. The conflict was “frozen” only through Russian mediation in 1992. The Georgian government has had no control over South Osetia since.
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Fully 90% of South Osetian residents willingly applied for, and received, full legal Russian citizenship. Even so, Russia did not enter Friday’s conflict until about 12-16 hours had passed. During this time, Russia first went to the UN to get them to condemn Saakashvili’s assault, and began defending the Osetin only after this avenue failed, and it became clear that they were being driven out of the city.
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Saakashvili attempted a scorched-earth blitzkrieg. Tskhinval has about 30,000 residents. In only the first few hours, the Georgian army killed hundreds (up to 2,000) people and created between 5-15 thousand refugees. Furthermore, they did their best to raze the city to the ground. Their first targets were hospitals, water reservoirs and the energy infrastructure. There was no way to put out the fires because there was no water. The Georgians also razed the Osetin villages on the approach to Tskhinval. Osetin eyewitnesses also report that the Georgians executed unarmed civilians and opened fire on refugee columns. All of this occurred long before Russia even arrived.
Over the past few years, Saakashvili has received $5 billion in state-of-the-art military equipment and training from the United States. This is a good example of how neoconservative ideology embroils us in conflicts that are <i>absolutely none of our business to begin with</i>. Osetia is a classic case of a <i>disputed territory</i>, where every side has its own historic claim, and nobody else knows or understands anything about it. And that’s as it should be. There is no reason why any other country would “need” to have some kind of opinion on the matter.
The Bush administration doesn’t give a shit about Georgia and Osetia. They propped up Saakashvili only because they desperately want to build American military bases around the entire Russian border in their delusional dream of “military dominance on every continent.” Saakashvili told them he’d let them do it, so they showered him with US taxpayer money – he has none of his own, the $5 billion was a <i>gift</i>. Because, you know, we don’t have any domestic problems of our own, so we’ve got so much money to spare.
So what does Saakashvili do? Naturally, being an insignificant, provincial dictator, he uses his alliance with the US as a cover for slaughtering civilians. Then, when Russia punches him in the face for killing hundreds of Russian citizens, he immediately goes running to the US and starts screeching for the US to go to war with Russia just to protect his little ethnic cleansing campaign. There is <i>no good reason whatsoever</i> why any American should have to pay for Saakashvili’s petty military ambitions.
Neither Bush nor the EU has any moral authority in this matter whatsoever. Hearing them talk about Georgian sovereignty is pretty funny when you consider that <i>just this year</i>, they destroyed Serbian sovereignty and gave Serbia’s land away to a band of separatists – and the Kosovo separatists were far more violent and aggressive than the Osetin. At the time, everybody with half a brain warned that this would create a dangerous precedent – and so it did!
Any American voter should use this occasion to think. Is it really worth giving away $5 billion to some petty thug, whose name you can’t pronounce, in a country that you can’t locate on a map, so this petty thug might then indiscriminately murder a bunch of people whom you have never heard of, and then try to hide behind your back like a little girl the moment his plan backfires? Is that really something you want our country to be a part of? Are you so rich, so well off, that you can afford to do this?