PUTIN: US BEHIND GEORGIAN WAR FOR DOMESTC POLITICAL REASONS

Yesterday, I mused about the possibility of an “October surprise” because of the war in Georgia, a way of making national security the key issue in the campaign, an issue that McCain can exploit. Apparently I am not the only one thinking this way.

Today, (Thurs) there was this bombshell:

CNN EXCLISIVE: Putin: U.S. orchestrated Georgian war

SOCHI, Russia (CNN) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of orchestrating the conflict in Georgia to benefit one of its presidential election candidates.

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Matthew Chance in the Black Sea city of Sochi Thursday, Putin said the U.S. had encouraged Georgia to attack the autonomous region of South Ossetia.

[SNIP]

“U.S. citizens were indeed in the area in conflict,” Putin said. “They were acting in implementing those orders doing as they were ordered, and the only one who can give such orders is their leader.”

LONDON BASED JOURNALIST WILLIAM BOWLES COMMENTS;

It’s obvious that the Georgian provocation instigated by the US, is part of a larger and even more ominous scheme of destabilization, but the issue here is more complex than ‘grand schemes of world domination’ because I contend that the real world of the collapsing capitalist economies is now dictating events (which makes the situation even more dangerous for all of us).

First of all, Russia is in the way of the US move Eastward, which is where Georgia plays a vital role, hence the need to get Georgia into NATO. However, as with many of the US’s previous ‘allies’, Saakashvili has proved to be totally unreliable (if not mentally unbalanced), and if as seems more than likely, the US ‘advised’ him to invade Ossetia, it has proved to be yet another strategic blunder, or did the US assume that the Russians would roll over and play dead?

Either way, under the circumstances the ‘Cold War’ card was all that was left to the West, but bluffing is all well and good when playing poker but not when the game is chess.

THOMAS GOLTZ, the author of Georgia Diary sees a more complicated situation:

By August 11, Georgia had in effect capitulated, and was begging for international diplomatic intervention. Russian tanks ruled the land, Russian aviation ruled the skies and Russian naval craft ruled the shores of the Black Sea. And Russian propaganda largely ruled the airwaves, too. That last victory might be summed up by the way the short war is usually represented even in the western media: namely, that the Russian counter-attack had been massively successful, and the man to blame for the mess was not Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (and certainly not Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) but the mercurial Georgian President, Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili.

Not.

A ‘counter attack’ assumes an initial attack, and the Georgians, while perhaps guilty of being lured into a trap, never attacked Russia. Rather, in the days prior to 8.8.8, Georgia had been responding to an escalating series of provocations inside South Ossetia and to a lesser extent in Abkhazia. That is how the war began, and how it should be remembered: it was and is a war of provocation followed by creeping annexation, and planned and executed with a surprising degree of efficiency, and complete audacity.

This was no where more in evidence than the decision by the Upper House of the Russian Duma on August 25th to recommend the recognition of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, IE, to tear these territories away from Georgia, and forever. The parliamentary decision was next passed by the Lower House and then signed by President Medvedev within 24 hours of its initial getting tabled, to the joy of the Ossetians and Abkhaz, the shock and anguish of Georgia and the baffled (and, after the recognition by the west of breakaway Kosovo last year, hypocritical) cries of ‘foul play!’ in western capitals. A bed-rock of the international system of relations between countries in place since 1945, namely, the inviolability of the territorial integrity of existing states, had just been removed, and Pandora’s Box opened.