Georgia was tricked, but by Russia or US?

[inanna]

LET'S RUN through this again. Vladimir Putin is not a nice man. The KGB, with whom the young Vlad earned his reputation as a people person, was not Russia's answer to the Rotary Club. As a direct consequence, Russian traditions of democracy remain wafer thin, a cracked veneer that fails utterly to conceal thuggery, rigged votes, oligarchic mafias, corruption, and the corpses of journalists. Are we clear?

Russia's current identity is composed, meanwhile, of a volatile mixture of intense nationalism and paranoia. Its rulers, whatever their labels, take it as read that their country exists under permanent threat of encirclement by its enemies. Now, here's the tricky part: there is nothing currently to suggest that they are mistaken. Intense nationalists of a different stripe, feed the paranoia of the intense nationalists in Moscow.

This is not, of course, the story we have been hearing. When the United States − having shredded the anti-ballistic missile treaty that gave nuclear deterrence its single justification − bribes Poland into housing rockets pointed at the Russians, we hear only of a "shield". When Georgia launches smaller rockets at a South Ossetian town, in defiance of all the humanitarian rules, we hear only that a freedom-loving but "provoked" Georgian leader has stepped into a cunning Russian trap.

<snip>

We are being sucked in, suckered and conscripted. As an economically embattled US flails after former glories, it fashions Nato into a blunt instrument. Whatever the organisation's purpose during the Cold War, it currently stands revealed as an expeditionary force on behalf of Washington's interests. That is not a useful development for Nato, Europe, America or the world.

Read more:http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion/display.var.2432197.0.georgia_was_tricked_but_by_russia_or_us.php

[thunder rising]

1. I can assure you Georgia started the shit. They failed to take out a few very important targets

to stop the tanks from rolling in and they got slapped down. Now, they did not get treated as badly as the USSR would have treaded them, nor as bad as the Chechnyan's got treated (but then I don't know the whole story there). This time the story is that Cheney and Bush goaded a little country into a fight just to watch them get slapped down. Cheney and Bush still like to torture humans just to see it happen; they knew we were never going to play the part of the cavalry.

In the end, people died and Bush and Cheney loved to watch the murder. They are sick people. They love to watch people die at their word.