Georgian rockets fired into South Ossettia in August.
Before this news completely gets lost in post-election euphoria, it seems worth highlighting because similar episodes are likely to crop up during the coming Obama administration.
Last August, people in the US were incited to fear and hostility directed at Russia for its "unprovoked attack" on the poor, harmless democratic Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus. Big bad Russia was up to its evil empire ways again.
Now the New York Times says the story is not so simple.
Immediately in the wake of the episode, it came out that John McCain's foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian Republic. Were the neocons egging on Georgia start a war so that John McCain could posture in the Cold War mode? It certainly seems possible -- these people have never given a damn who they got killed and rendered homeless in the service of their imperial pipedreams.TBILISI, Georgia -- Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.
Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia's inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.
Worse, the super-heated election context pushed Obama off his initial, sensible, wait-and-see reaction to offering support for McCain and Bush's bluster at the Russians.
It seems most likely that neo-imperialists in Washington and the military will happily encourage similar challenges when Obama takes office. The C.I.A. in its heyday in 1961 did the same to the incoming John F. Kennedy administration with its Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
At the very least, we the people need to loudly and insistently demand that an Obama administration follow a new course, a resort to dialogue and cooperation in foreign affairs, that repudiates Washington's delusional pursuit of world domination. The peace movement has its work cut out for itself in Obama-land.
1 comment:
I remember when McCain used the Georgia example to show that Obama would not keep the country safe. I was upset because Obama didn't challenge him on that because it had been reported that Georgia started the whole fracas instead of Russia, as McCain asserted.
Eisenhower warned us of the military-industrial complex and he was right.
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