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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 27, 2008 2:54:08 GMT -6
from Information Clearing House: War With Russia Is On The Agenda By Paul Craig Roberts 26/08/08 " Thinking about the massive failure of the US media to report truthfully is sobering. The United States, bristling with nuclear weapons and pursuing a policy of world hegemony, has a population that is kept in the dark--indeed brainwashed--about the most important and most dangerous events of our time. The power of the Israel Lobby is an important component of keeping Americans in the dark. Recently I watched a documentary that demonstrates the control that the Israel Lobby exercises over Americans’ view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The documentary is available here: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14055.htm As a result of the US media’s one-sided coverage, few Americans are aware that for decades Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes and lands under protection of America’s veto in the United Nations. Instead, the dispossessed Palestinians are portrayed as mindless terrorists who attack innocent Israel. If one reads Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz, or publications from Israeli organizations, such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, one gets a radically different view of the situation than the propagandistic version delivered by US media and evangelical pulpits. Most Americans know of the 2000 attack by Muslim terrorists on the USS Cole in Aden harbor that resulted in 17 dead and 39 wounded American sailors. But few have heard of Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 American sailors dead and 174 wounded. Pressured by the Israel Lobby, President Johnson ordered Admiral McCain, father of the Republican presidential nominee, to cover up the attack. To this day there never has been a congressional investigation. The failure of the American media is again evident in the coverage of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The US media presented the conflict as a Russian invasion of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia, a separatist province. Russian peacekeepers, together with Georgian ones, had been stationed in South Ossetia since the early 1990s. On orders from Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet “president” of Georgia, the Georgian peacekeepers turned their weapons on the unsuspecting Russian peacekeepers and murdered them. This action by Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony, was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili, as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein. But it is Russia, not Saakashvili, that the US media has demonized. Americans have become perfect subjects for George Orwell’s Big Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York Times or Washington Post and absorb the lies fed to them. What is wrong with Americans? Why do they put up with it? Are Americans the nation of sheep that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says they are? Americans flaunt “freedom and democracy” and live under a Ministry of Propaganda. Two decades ago, President Reagan reached agreement with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to end the dangerous cold war. But every one of Reagan’s successors has sought to pick a new fight with Russia. In violation of the agreement, NATO has been taken to Russia’s borders, and the US is determined to put former constituent parts of Russia herself into NATO. In an effort to neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and compromise her independence, the US is putting anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia’s borders. The gratuitously aggressive US military policy toward Russia will lead to nuclear war. I am confident that if Americans elect John McCain, or the Republicans steal another presidential election, there will be nuclear war in the second decade of the 21st century. The neocon lies, propaganda, macho flag-waving, and use of US foreign policy in the interests of a few military-security firms, oil companies, and Israel are all leading in that direction. The November election is perhaps the last chance to avoid nuclear war. But the opportunity might already have been missed. The Republicans have chosen as their candidate one of the most ignorant warmongers alive. The Democrats’ choice was between one of the most divisive women in America and a man of mixed race with a funny name. Considering American’s taste for war, the Democratic candidate could fail to defeat the GOP war candidate. Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black. Why does mixed ancestry confer the black label? If America’s population was predominantly black, would Obama be considered white? Race and propaganda are more likely to determine the outcome of the November election than any awareness or consideration of real issues by voters. The real issues are suffocated by the media. The American middle class is being destroyed by jobs offshoring and work visas for foreigners, while the incomes of the super rich are soaring. The US dollar’s reserve currency status is eroded. The US is massively in debt at home and abroad. Health insurance is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Injured veterans are being nickeled and dimed, while Halliburton’s profits escalate. Americans are losing their homes, while the US government bails out banks. Wars with Iran, Russia, and China are being planned in order to secure US hegemony. Americans no longer have a government that is for the people and by the people. They have a government for and by special interests and an insane ideology. But Americans have war, which lets them take out all their frustrations, resentments, and disappointments on “Muslim terrorists” and “Russian aggressors.” Few Americans are disturbed that 1.25 million Iraqis and an unknown number of Afghans have died as a result of American invasions based on Bush regime lies and deceptions. Even Americans, like Senator Biden, Obama’s selection for vice president, who understand that the wars are based on lies, still want the US to win. So, it was all a mistake and a deception, but let’s win anyway and keep on killing. I know people who still complain that the US did not nuke North Vietnam. When I ask why Vietnam should have been nuked, they reply, “if we had nuked them we would have won.” What would America have won? The answer is world loathing and the loss of the cold war. For many Americans, war is like a sports contest in which they take vicarious pleasure and cheer on their side to victory. Millions of Americans are still bitter that “the liberal media” and war protesters caused America to lose the Vietnam war, and they are determined that this won’t happen again. These Americans have no realization that there was no more reason for the US to be fighting in Vietnam 40 years ago than to be fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan or tomorrow in Iran. Obama, if elected, is no guarantee against nuclear war. Obama has shown that he is as much under the Israel Lobby’s thumb as McCain. Obama’s foreign affairs advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not a neocon, but he was born in Warsaw, Poland, and has the Pole’s animosity toward Russia. The Bush administration has already changed US war doctrine to permit preemptive nuclear attack. With the US government determined to ring Russia with puppet states and military bases, war is inevitable. Presidential appointees face confirmation in the Senate. Any of Obama’s appointees who might be out of step with plans for US and Israeli hegemony could expect opposition from large corporations and the Israel Lobby. There is no assurance that an Obama administration would not be positioned on “the issues” by the same special interests that have positioned the Bush administration. Americans are filled with hubris, not with knowledge. They have no awareness of the calamity that their government’s pursuit of hegemony is bringing to themselves and to life on earth.”" www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20626.htm
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Post by judes on Aug 28, 2008 11:51:57 GMT -6
Hmmm, will our hand in helping build China to the global giant they have become come back to bite us in the ass? We transferred our wealth, our jobs and our technologies to them on a silver platter. Will they now become a thorn in the sides of those who wish to orchestrate American hegemony? Who'da thunk? www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=as0UGmmuMjZMRussia proposed expanding a security alliance with China and four former Soviet republics to counter NATO as the European Union considered sanctions on Russia for its recognition of two separatist Georgian regions.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 28, 2008 13:16:30 GMT -6
from the article:
"The U.S. views the fact the Shanghai group and other countries haven't recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as evidence of international disapproval of Russia's actions, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.
``I would just say that it wasn't what I would call an endorsement of Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia,'' Wood told reporters in Washington today. ``The fact that you haven't seen countries come forth and recognize these two parts of Georgia's territory is a significant sign.''....
China, which has restive ethnic populations in its western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and claims sovereignty over Taiwan, has been wary of inserting itself into the international dispute over Russia's actions in Georgia. "
Robert Wood is just another dishonest, Bush-junta windbag. China's been "wary" because they're 100% dependent on the US export market for economic growth, and don't dare risk losing that market by offending the US Corporatocracy by taking Russia's side.
Without the US's export market of $260 billion, China's economy would collapse.
And China knows it.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 31, 2008 16:24:06 GMT -6
from wireddispatch.com/Reuters: Putin: U.S. military advisers in Georgia conflictby Guy Faulconbridge, Reuters North American News Service Aug 29, 2008 " (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said U.S. military advisers had been involved in this month's conflict in Georgia and the White House could have planned it to help Republicans win the U.S. election....
Putin said Russia had acted fully in accordance with international law in defending South Ossetia, which was attacked by Georgian forces on Aug 7-8, sparking an international crisis.
"We know there were a lot of U.S. advisers (in Georgia)... but instructors, teachers and personnel for military weapons should be on firing ranges and in the teaching centres -- but where were they? They were in the zone of military operations."
"And that pushes one to the conclusion that the leadership of the United States knew about the action that was being prepared and moreover probably took part in it," Putin said....
"In a significant way the crisis was provoked, including by our American friends in the course of the election struggle. This was the use of administrative resources in a deplorable way to provide advantage to one of the candidates, in the current case from the ruling party," Putin said....
Putin said that Russia had found signs U.S. citizens had been in the zone of military operations in Georgia.
"If the leadership of the United States had sanctioned that, then I have the suspicion that it was done specially to organise a small, victorious war," Putin said.
"And if it didn't work then to make Russia appear like an enemy and on those grounds unite the electorate around one presidential candidate, of course the ruling party."....
Putin, who stepped down as president in May after eight years as the Kremlin chief, said Russia had "swallowed" independence for Kosovo but been rewarded with a conflict on its border, which Moscow viewed as an attack on Russia itself.
He said Europe had ignored Serbia's territorial integrity by recognising Kosovo at the behest of the White House....
Georgia has accused Russia of using the conflict to topple Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and to hinder Georgia's aspirations to join the NATO military alliance.
When asked if that was the real aim of Russia during the conflict, Putin said: "That is not the case, that is simply juggling with the facts and a lie."
He said the United States had used NATO to keep Europe under control after the end of the Cold War and that Russia was being artificially built up an enemy.
"They needed an external enemy and Iran doesn't suit that role very well, and they want to resuscitate Russia as the threat," he said...." wiredispatch.com/news/?id=321110
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Sept 1, 2008 3:34:03 GMT -6
from chris-floyd.com Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War Thursday, 28 August 2008 " As we noted...Arthur Silber has written a powerful and profound series of articles on the Joe Biden VP nomination, and its deeper implications....
Joe Biden's acceptance speech was indeed a remarkable performance -- bellicose and delusional and deceitful by turns. If you closed your eyes, there were moments when you would have thought that you were back in the Cow Palace in 1964, listening to Barry Goldwater belching fire and threatening doom for all those who challenge America's uniquely exceptional special unquestionable morally superior dominance of the world.
Arthur Silber points us to some of the money shots in Biden's speech. And the porn allusion is entirely appropriate in this case. The speech, like the whole evening -- which was given over to the glorification of war and the triumphant militarization of American society -- was a lurid example of the pornography of power....
"Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years and in recent days, we've once again seen the consequences of the neglect -- of this neglect, with Russia challenging the very freedom of a new democratic country of Georgia. Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we will help the people of Georgia rebuild."
What will he and Barack do to hold the Russians "accountable"? And accountable for what? For acting precisely as the bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States has acted for decades: using military power to achieve political ends and "project dominance" to protect "national interests" as defined by the ruling clique? And in this case -- unlike, oh, say, the Americans in Iraq or Somalia or Panama or Lebanon or Vietnam, etc. -- the Russians were provoked into action when their soldiers (lawfully stationed in South Ossetia with UN sanction, just like the American troops at the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) were assaulted and killed, along with numerous innocent civilians, in a sneak attack by Georgian forces armed and trained by Washington.
What would an American administration have done in such a case? It would have laid waste to Tbilisi, as was done in Baghdad, Fallujah, Belgrade. It would have occupied Georgia; it would have sent soldiers barging into houses to drag out the menfolk and terrorize the women and children; it would have constructed enormous prisons to hold tens of thousands of Georgians captive, without charges, for months and years on end; it would bring in secret agents of unnameable agencies and private contractors to conduct "strenuous interrogations;" it would drop 500-pound bombs on residential areas if some guy at a computer console in a hole in Nebraska operating a drone camera spotted a Georgian man carrying a weapon or even -- heaven forbid! -- firing a weapon at the people who invaded and occupied his country, destroyed his home and killed his kinsmen.
In other words, the reaction of any American administration to such a provocation (or as in the case of Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Vietnam, etc., to no provocation whatsoever) would make Russia's action in Georgia look like a game of beach volleyball. Yet big bad Joe Biden -- and his commander-in-chief, Barry Goldwa--sorry, Barack Obama -- are going to hold Russia "accountable" (in some conveniently unspecified way) for not acting as brutally as any American administration would have done in the same situation.
(Of course, when the same Russian leaders did conduct a brutal, savage war of destruction -- in Chechnya -- there was no talk whatsoever about "holding them accountable," or kicking Russia out of the G-8, or imposing sanctions. But the Kremlin, being weaker then -- before Bush's wars and rumors of war enriched Russia with oil price spikes -- was thought to be more obedient. Now Moscow is more recalcitrant. And it is the recalcitrance -- not the "military aggression" or the "Putin tyranny" -- that sticks in the Anglo-American craw. For more on the implications of the "new Cold War-ism" breaking out among the Anglo-American elite, see these excellent analyses in the Guardian, here and here, and these letters to the paper's editor here.)
Biden declares that Georgia has been "destroyed." This is not true. There has been damage and there have been deaths, and none of them are justified (on either side). But Georgia is not in ruins, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, the three main targets (so far) of the American "War on Terror" that Biden so ardently embraced in his speech.
Biden called for a billion dollars in aid to "rebuild" Georgia. All well and good -- if this aid is really to be used to help innocent people in Georgia who got caught in the crossfire between the idiotic and violent Mikhail Saakashvili and the calculating and violent Vladimir Putin. Of course, it would be a first if such a thing happened -- if most of the "aid" didn't turn out to be weapons for the local warlord and pork for various cronies back home -- but these are days of hope and change, so who knows?
But here's a curious thing. Later on in his speech Biden says that, in Iraq, he and Obama will "shift the responsibility to the Iraqis." The Georgians, who instigated a war they could not possibly win, must be given all assistance to "rebuild" their undestroyed country; but the Iraqis, whose country was invaded and destroyed in a flagrantly criminal action by a vastly superior power, have to "take responsibility" for the damned mess that got made over there in Mesopotamia.
A mess that Biden himself was instrumental in creating, as Stephen Zunes points out in great and damning detail. Here are some excerpts of his article, via Arthur Silber again:
[Biden] has been one [of] the leading congressional supporters of U.S. militarization of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, of strict economic sanctions against Cuba, and of Israeli occupation policies.
Most significantly, however, Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the lead-up to the Iraq War during the latter half of 2002, was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that oil-rich country...
It is difficult to overestimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible. More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on Aug. 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the American public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.
And, as Zunes and Silber note, Biden was calling for an invasion of Iraq years before "9/11 changed everything" -- just like the Cheney-Rumsfeld "Project for the New American Century" group, which openly yearned for a "new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" its agenda for the expansion of empire and further militarization of American society:
Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration's lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of "weapons of mass destruction" years before President George W. Bush even came to office.
As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq's WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. ...
Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, "The only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone," telling the Marine veteran [and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter] "it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down."
When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton's proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were "beyond your pay grade." As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam's failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.
Zunes and Silber also bring out one other point that bears repeating, over and over: Biden has been a champion of dismembering Iraq, chopping the country up in a forced partition that even the Bush Administration found too extreme. Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote here about one of the "partition" plans that so-called "liberals" like Biden have been bandying about:
While Bush pursues ethnic cleansing by stealth in Iraq -- or rather, pursues it quite openly, but just doesn't call it ethnic cleansing -- the Democrats and their outriders, the "liberal hawks" (or "humanitarian interventionists" or "Wilsonian idealists" or whatever tag they're wearing these days) are championing the policy in the public sphere. The idea of a three-way split of Iraq between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds has long been mooted in some quarters -- Joe Biden and "liberal" intellectuals like Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith were early enthusiasts -- and it is now gaining force within the foreign policy "clerisy"... Firedoglake points us to the incisive commentaries of Reidar Visser, "an actual expert on the regional aspects of Iraq and its history," who has lately been debunking the deeply ignorant and murderously arrogant "partition" proposals of Galbraith and others.
Visser takes aim at one of the most hideous of these proposals: "The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq," by respected "scholars" Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph:
...using cool academic language, the authors review the nuts and bolts of relocating somewhere between 2 and 5 million Iraqis in order to create new ethnic federal entities. Snippets from this part of the report probably speak best for themselves: “we advocate where possible dividing major cities along natural boundaries” (p. 16); “on the actual day of the relocation operation, Iraqi and US-led coalition forces would deploy in sufficient numbers to look for snipers, cover the flanks of the civilian convoys, inspect suspicious vehicles for explosives and conduct similar tasks” (p. 17); and finally, on p. 24, “this [internal border] control system would place some burdens on Iraq’s internal trade and other aspects of its economy. It would complicate the efforts of individuals to cross from one region to another to visit family and friends. For the most part these burdens would be bearable. For individuals or businesses that need to make frequent crossings across Iraq’s new internal borders, or those willing to pay for the privilege, an EZ pass system [sic] might be developed to expedite movements for those with important and regular business to conduct.”
"On the actual day of the relocation operation...." Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by "Iraqi and US-led coalition forces." Actually it's not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah," and "Schindler's List." Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the "relocations" of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the "Trail of Tears," the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.
These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O'Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: "For the most part these burdens would be bearable."
I have a suggestion for Mr. O'Hanlon [and Joe Biden]. I propose that he subject himself to such a regimen, then come back and tell just us how "bearable" it is. He doesn't even have to move five million Iraqis under armed guard to participate in this experiment: he can go to Palestine right now, where the people already live under his kind of "soft partition." Let him try it on for himself, just for a few months -- not the lifelong sentence he proposes for the Iraqis. We can even give him an "EZ Pass" to expedite any "important business" he needs to do.
This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them.
All of this is OK with Joe Biden. As noted, he was one of the earliest advocates of partition. But in the end, it doesn't matter: partition the Iraqis, abandon them, occupy them openly -- or covertly occupy them with "non-permanent" permanent bases for "residual forces" and "training brigades" and "counterrorism response" and "force protection," which is the current Obama plan -- who the hell cares? We've killed a million of their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers, but now it's time to go strut around in Georgia, it's time to bring more heat to Afghanistan and nuclear-armed, politically unstable Pakistan, "the real central front in the war on terror," as Biden proclaimed on Wednesday. The Iraqis are trash, pure trash; let them "take responsibility" -- while we do whatever the hell we want to do, or don't want to do, with their country.
As we said here yesterday: listen to what Biden and Obama are actually saying. I consider myself a fairly skeptical person, especially about politicians and their promises of "change" and "hope," but even I have been taken aback by how openly brutal and bloodthirsty the Obama campaign has become. I thought they would make much more hay of the "anti-war" stance, but they threw that aside long ago, and have now put one of the chief enablers of the war on the national ticket. It turns out that Obama is not "anti-war" (even as a cynical, vote-getting posture); he and Biden and the Democratic establishment -- and vast tracts of the "liberal" blogosphere as well -- are simply "other-war."
Iraq was the wrong war, you see, the wrong application of deadly, murderous force for dubious ends that have nothing to do with the well-being and security and pressing concerns of ordinary American citizens. But they heartily approve such applications elsewhere, and hope to see more of them.
***
I must admit that these days I'm feeling much as I did in the weeks and months after 9/11, when it seemed the whole nation had gone mad -- and deaf as well, simply not hearing the crimes and atrocities and immoral, dishonorable actions that were being planned and promised in their names. For example, what in God's name did people think Dick Cheney was talking about when he announced on national television -- on Sept. 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks -- that "we will also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will"? Or when George W. Bush declared on Aug. 7, 2002: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." Or in the long, slow build-up to the act of aggression against Iraq, when the most transparent lies were told -- easily debunkable by the most ordinary person with an internet connection or the slightest acquaintance with recent history, as I used to demonstrate week after week in the Moscow Times -- much less by savvy "foreign policy experts" like Joe Biden?
To speak out against all this -- to simply point to plain facts and the obvious implications of what national leaders were actually saying, to take the very traditional and indeed conservative position that America should not wage aggressive war and should obey its own laws -- was in those days like shouting into a hurricane. Nobody listened, nobody cared, and any nay-sayer was denounced as a crank or a fool or a traitor, whose dangerous carping would give aid and comfort to the enemy, and help the bad guys win. Strange days indeed.
And here we are again. Joe Biden stood on a stage before the world Wednesday night and, echoing Barack Obama's own positions, clearly promised more hell on earth for us all. Yet his speech was greeted rapturously across almost all of the liberal commentariat, and treated respectfully, as a serious and completely legitimate policy statement, even by those politically opposed to Biden and his boss.
But if you point to the plain facts and obvious implications of what the leaders of the Democratic ticket are saying -- i.e., "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland" -- you will be accused of "helping John McCain into the White House." You will be denounced for trying to derail "our last hope for change, however imperfect it may be."
But it is not the critics of the openly stated positions taken by Obama and Biden who are "derailing our last hope for change." It is these powerful men in the pursuit of more power who are betraying those hopes by embracing the corruption and violence of domination, belligerence, greed, militarism, and imperial expansion. I'm not forcing them to do it. I don't want them to do it. But should we not tell the truth as we see it?"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Sept 2, 2008 23:58:29 GMT -6
Interesting interview with Roberts.
It's also interesting that the interview is listed under "uk.youtube." I guess the US version of Youtube bans people like Paul Craig Roberts and Bob Chapman.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Sept 15, 2008 0:22:39 GMT -6
from Reuters: Sackashiti planned S. Ossetia invasionBy Brian Rohan " Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had long planned a military strike to seize back the breakaway region of South Ossetia but executed it poorly, making it easy for Russia to retaliate, Saakashvili's former defence minister said.
Irakly Okruashvili, Georgia's leading political exile, said in a weekend interview in Paris that the United States was partly to blame for the war, having failed to check the ambitions of what he called a man with democratic failings.
Saakashvili's days as president were now numbered, he said.
The former defence minister's remarks are significant because Saakashvili has always maintained Russia started the war by invading his country. The Georgian president said he handed EU leaders last week "very strong proof" that Moscow was to blame, though he did not give details.
But Okruashvili, a close Saakashvili ally who served as defence minister from 2004 to 2006, said he and the president worked together on military plans to invade South Ossetia and a second breakaway region on the Black Sea coast, Abkhazia.
"Abkhazia was our strategic priority, but we drew up military plans in 2005 for taking both Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well," Okruashvili said.
There was no immediate reaction from Saakashvili's officials to his remarks.
While in office, Okruashvili was an outspoken hawk, overseeing a military buildup and calling for Georgia to take back South Ossetia -- his birthplace -- by force.
But in the interview he fiercely criticized Saakashvili's handling of the war, which he said was launched in haste, without diplomatic support and failed to take account of a build-up of Russian forces in the region.
TWO-PRONGED OPERATION
"The original plans called for a two-pronged operation entering South Ossetia, taking Tskhinvali, the Roki Tunnel and Java," he said, referring respectively to the regional capital, the main border crossing between Russia and the rebel region, and another key town.
"Saakashvili's offensive only aimed at taking Tskhinvali, because he thought the U.S. would block a Russian reaction through diplomatic channels."
"But when the U.S. reaction turned out to be non-existent, Saakashvili then moved troops toward the Roki tunnel, only to be outmaneuvered by the Russians," he said.
Russia responded to the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali by pouring troops and tanks through the Roki tunnel into South Ossetia, routing the Georgian army. Okruashvili said that outcome was inevitable.
"After 2006 we didn't have the possibility for success by military means... the Russians had repositioned and improved their military infrastructure in the North Caucasus, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia -- and obviously they did it for us."
Okruashvili said the Georgian president could have ordered his army to defend several key towns from the Russians but "let the Russians in to avoid criticism and appear more of a victim".
Washington had always made clear to the Georgian leadership that it would not support an invasion, Okruashvili added.
"When we met President Bush in May 2005, we were told directly: don't involve yourself in a military confrontation. We won't be able to help you militarily."
Okruashvili, 34, fled to Europe in 2007 after imprisonment in Georgia, where he faced corruption charges he denied, saying they were intended to punish him for criticizing the president.
In March, a Georgian court sentenced him to 11 years in prison in absentia, but he was granted asylum in France where last week a court rejected Tbilisi's extradition request.
Okruashvili said Washington was partly to blame for the war because it uncritically supported Saakashvili despite his growing authoritarianism.
"There were no checks and balances. The institutions he created all revolved around him. Lack of criticism from the U.S. allowed him to go too far," he said.
Okruashvili said the Georgian president should now resign or face possible prosecution for ordering the war....
"(Saakashvili) must be held accountable and resign. If he steps down, he shouldn't be prosecuted. But if he doesn't it will lead to criminal charges against him," Okruashvili said.
Propelled to the forefront of the opposition when the charges brought against him helped spark mass demonstrations in Tbilisi, Okruashvili said he hoped the coming anniversary of those protests would rally the president's critics.
"November 7th will be a test. We'll see how much the opposition is able to mobilize," he said....
"I will return within a year, even if it means risking jail. But in the meantime I will try to create the right conditions. Saakashvili's days are numbered."" www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSLD12378020080914?sp=true
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