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Written by J.Hawk exclusively for SouthFront
At the time it happened and shortly after its conclusion, the brief war between Georgia, the breakaway republics, and Russia, has had relatively limited international political consequences, commensurate with the conflict’s brevity and comparatively low level of violence which can hardly be compared with the prolonged and far bloodier wars in Libya, Syria, or even the NATO quagmire in Afghanistan which continues to claim far more lives every year. In retrospect, it proved to be a preview of far worse things to come, in the process also illustrating the respective roles played by Western governments and local “political entrepreneurs” of countries around Russia’s periphery in the forming of West-Russia relations.
Before the West Went Insane
The single most striking feature of the war is the aforementioned limited international consequences. Today, cases like the MH17 shoot-down, chemical attacks in Syria, elections “meddling”, or the alleged UK poisonings, where Russia’s responsibility has not been plausibly demonstrated and which likely were perpetrated by other actors, are sufficient to provoke major sanctions, expulsions of diplomats, and even military action that on more than one occasion brought the world to the brink of a shooting war among nuclear powers. In stark contrast with the current state of affairs, US and European reaction was actually pretty balanced and based on objective facts rather than on a desire to impose on Russia a certain set of political solutions by force. For starters, the European Union’s investigation of the conflict actually and correctly attributed the blame for the aggression to Georgia, faulting Russia only in excessively reacting to the Georgian attack even though, in actuality, Russian forces could have occupied a far greater part of the country and inflicted irreparable damage to vital infrastructure like international pipelines. Similarly, the United States, in the final year of the “lame duck” George W. Bush administration, did not opt for a military or political confrontation with Russia, and the theme of the war was barely broached during the US presidential campaign whose main figures were Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton (Obama’s tenacious opponent for the Democratic Party’s nomination), and John McCain, all of whom have since become ardent “Russia hawks” promoting confrontation at every turn. And once Obama soundly defeated John McCain and won the presidency in the wake of 2008 financial crash, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Moscow where she presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with the now-infamous “reset button” which represented a symbol of the Obama administration’s desire to improve the actually not that bad US-Russia relations. Moreover, the later-controversial contract Mistral amphibious assault/command ships signed between France and Russia was signed in 2010, or two years after the alleged “Russian aggression”. So, what happened?
Snakes in the Grass
The main reason for this remarkably restraint was the lack of coordination between the local political entrepreneurs of the Russian periphery and the leadership of Western powers. These entrepreneurs include not only Georgia’s Saakashvili but also Ukraine’s Maidan leaders, Poland’s political elite, and most of the Baltic States’ key leaders. What unites them is the desire to use the West to accomplish their own political objectives, ranging from the achievement and maintenance of domestic political power (which can be done by accusing all opponents of being Russian agents) to re-establishing regional hegemony (as in the case of Poland, which still views the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus as parts of its 17th century Commonwealth). But Saakashvili clearly jumped the proverbial gun, as the West at that point evidently has not formed a consensus that a confrontation with Russia would be beneficial to its interests. The only clear-cut support he received came from countries like Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics, who were the first to proclaim the war in Georgia a case of “Russian aggression”, a label rather few others adopted at the time. But even in Poland it was a minority view, since the wave of Russophobia that would sweep that country was still two years in the future—it was only in 2010 that the now-ruling Law and Justice party leaders decided to transform the Smolensk aviation tragedy into another case of “Russian aggression”, a view that, incidentally, is actually not shared among NATO members, presumably because giving it that label implies triggering NATO’s Article 5 provisions on collective defense, potentially leading to a world war.
“It’s the Economy, Stupid”
The reason, in turn, for the West’s disinterest in elevating the Georgia war was prosaic—the financial crisis has only just begun and at that time everyone felt it could be easily contained and overcome simply by monetary policy alone. The monetary stimulus and bailouts by US and EU central banks were only then getting under way, and the architects of these measures falsely promised they would deliver a full recovery.
By the time of the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” the sense of complacency was gone, as the massive monetary stimulus merely succeeded in inflating a new investment bubble—the record-breaking US stock markets touted by Donald Trump are not a reflection of US economy’s health but rather of the post-2008 oversupply of liquidity. Therefore Western policies have grown increasingly more desperate, Poroshenko found understanding where Saakashvili found nearly none, and Georgia retroactively became the original “act of Russian aggression”, although it was not treated like one when it actually happened.
Donald Trump’s willingness to risk trade war with virtually the entire world is merely the continuation of the policy pioneered during the Obama era, which aim at rescuing Western economies by opening new markets, reducing costs of raw materials, and eliminating economic competitors, by force if need be. But whereas Obama’s foreign policy team aimed only at Russia, Trump is far less discriminate. It is noteworthy that the economic measures imposed by the US on China, the European Union, and now also NATO ally Turkey are strikingly similar in their ultimate impact—clearing out the field of unwanted competition to the US—even though the rationale is different in every case.
Forewarned is Forearmed
It seems unlikely Western leaders in 2008 already knew what they would do in 2014—Hillary’s “reset button” makes no sense in that scenario, and neither does the EU report exonerating Russia from the charge of aggression. But the war did prove to be an early warning to the Kremlin, in the sense that it revealed the hollowness and widespread obsolescence of the Russian military and the dangers lurking in the “near abroad”. Prior to the Georgia war, Russia was clearly pursuing a course toward political and economic integration with the West, one that has not been fully abandoned even today, a decade later. But after 2008, the Kremlin became more circumspect in its dealings with the West and cognizant of the need to modernize its military so it could effectively deal with similar crises on its borders, launched under similar circumstances. Had it not been for the 2008 war, the Russian military likely would not have been as prepared to react to the Maidan Revolution or to rescue Syria, and the Russian economy would have had to suffer a far greater shock from sanctions, not unlike the more West-integrated Turkish economy is suffering.
Thus in the end Western strategies have been undermined by a loose-cannon proxy actor who acted before the West was ready to adopt a more aggressive strategy toward Russia. When that strategy finally materialized, the intended target, Russia, was more prepared to meet the threat than she would have been otherwise.
The Source of all these Atrocities rolling Russia, Muslims and the Whole World into the flour is :
Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of the catastrophe in Afghanistan, dead at 89
By Bill Van Auken
29 May 2017
Zbigniew Brzezinski, security adviser to Democratic President Jimmy Carter and a longtime proponent of an aggressive strategy for asserting US global hegemony, died Friday at the age of 89.
During his four-year tenure in the Carter White House, Brzezinski was involved in a large number of criminal operations carried out by US imperialism around the globe, from support for the Shah’s attempts to drown the Iranian Revolution in blood to the initiation of a US policy in Central America that led to bloody counterinsurgency campaigns that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Unquestionably, however, the greatest of these crimes, and one for which he proudly took credit, was the orchestration and support of a dirty war waged by Islamist mujahedeen against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s.
Born into an aristocratic Polish family that was forced to take refuge in Canada, where his father was a diplomat at the outbreak of World War II, Brzezinski’s outlook and policies were grounded in a ferocious hatred of revolution, socialism and the Soviet Union.
He was recruited into anti-Soviet operations while lecturing at Harvard University in the 1950s. He was among a delegation sent by the CIA through its front group, the “Independent Service for Information,” to intervene at a Soviet-backed world youth festival held in Vienna in 1959. He was described by contemporaries as the most anticommunist and provocative of those sent by the US intelligence agency.
In the early 1970s, Brzezinski was tapped by David Rockefeller to head the Trilateral Commission, a body created to coordinate imperialist strategy between Washington, Western Europe and Japan. The commission, made up of influential business and political figures, in turn, threw its support behind the 1976 presidential campaign of Democrat Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia and seen as a Washington “outsider” who could provide a fresh face after the debacle of the administration of Richard Nixon and that of his successor, Gerald Ford. Members of the commission occupied key posts in the Carter administration, with Brzezinski as national security adviser exercising overwhelming influence over US foreign policy.
It was in this position that Brzezinski authored one of the greatest crimes carried out by US imperialism in the 20th century, the instigation of a war in Afghanistan that has continued to ravage the country to this day.
In its obituary of Brzezinski, the New York Times acknowledges that “his rigid hatred of the Soviet Union” had placed him “to the right of many Republicans, including Mr. Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon.” It adds that under Carter he directed US policy with the aim of “thwarting Soviet expansionism at any cost…for better or worse.” As an example, it states, “He supported billions in military aid for Islamic militants fighting invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan.”
This is a deliberate distortion of the real role played by Washington, its military and the CIA in Afghanistan, under Brzezinski’s direction.
Brzezinski acknowledged in an interview with the French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998 that he initiated a policy in which the CIA covertly began arming the mujahedeen in July 1978—six months before Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan—with the explicit aim of dragging the Soviet Union into a debilitating war.
Asked, given the catastrophe unleashed upon Afghanistan and the subsequent growth of Islamist terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, whether he regretted the policy he championed in Afghanistan, Brzezinski replied:
“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
Asked specifically whether he regretted the CIA’s collaboration with and arming of Islamist extremists, including Al Qaeda, in fomenting the war in Afghanistan, Brzezinski responded contemptuously: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
In the four decades of nearly uninterrupted fighting that flowed from Brzezinski’s “excellent idea”—with nearly 9,000 US troops still on the ground and plans being set in motion to carry out another escalation—over 2 million Afghans have lost their lives and millions more have been turned into refugees.
In the aftermath of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy’s formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Brzezinski refocused his long-standing maniacal hostility to the USSR toward a strategy to assert undisputed US hegemony over Eurasia.
He was among the more influential imperialist strategists in shaping a policy of attempting to offset the long-term decline in the world position of American capitalism by resorting to Washington’s unchallenged supremacy in terms of military might. This turn would lead to unending wars in the Middle East and Central Asia designed to assert undisputed American dominance in the regions containing the lion’s share of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves.
In an article published in the September-October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, Brzezinski argued:
“Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and historical legacy … In a volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role.”
Expanding on this thesis in his book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski voiced his concern about the major obstacle to Washington pursuing such an aggressive drive for hegemony: the hostility of the vast majority of the American people to war.
He wrote: “… America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifices (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” [The Grand Chessboard, Basic Books, pp. 35-36].
Four years later, on September 11, 2001, the “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being” that the former national security adviser saw as a necessary precondition for launching a global campaign of American militarism was served up by the very forces that he and the CIA had promoted in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, with its historic ties to US intelligence, claimed credit for the attacks on New York City and Washington, which were carried out by individuals who were able to move remarkably unhindered in and out of the US.
Brzezinski was a virulent opponent of revolution, socialism and any challenge to the existing capitalist order from the left. In 1968, during the mass protests against the Vietnam War, he wrote in the New Republic that students should be prevented from protesting by locking them up, adding that if the protests’ “leadership cannot be physically liquidated, it can at least be expelled from the country.”
In more recent years, particularly in the wake of the meltdown of the global capitalist financial system in 2008, Brzezinski has repeatedly warned of the “growing risk of class hatred” and the danger of radicalization among young people under conditions of unsustainable levels of social inequality.
In his 2012 book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, he wrote: “Populations of young adults… are especially explosive when combined with the revolution in communication technology.” He continued: “Often educated but unemployed, their resulting frustration and alienation” leaves them “susceptible to ideological agitation and revolutionary mobilization.”
In a television interview that year, he warned that a growing “sense of social injustice can be terribly demoralizing and, politically in the long run, very dangerous.”
While able to perceive this danger and issue his warnings, Brzezinski was no more able than any other representative of America’s capitalist ruling establishment to offer a rational, much less progressive, answer to the rising social and class conflicts that pose the threat of revolution.
A mass murdering Orc for the history books. Breezer makes Osama and Baghdadi look like common street hooligans.
Next on line is Iran and Ukraine ! ! ! ? ? ?
L’Allemagne soigne des soldats ukrainiens sans savoir s’ils ont servi dans l’armée régulière ou dans des bataillons néo-nazis https://www.agoravox.FR/actualites/international/article/l-allemagne-soigne-des-soldats-206744
Kiev va remplacer le salut traditionnel de l’armée par le slogan des collaborateurs ukrainiens du régime Nazi https://www.agoravox.FR/actualites/international/article/kiev-va-remplacer-le-salut-206721
Les principes de l’Otan qui contredisent la réalité https://www.agoravox.FR/tribune-libre/article/les-principes-de-l-otan-qui-206763
La Question de la Guerre contre l’Iran https://www.agoravox.FR/tribune-libre/article/la-question-de-la-guerre-contre-l-206722
Relisons Orwell et Huxley https://www.agoravox.FR/tribune-libre/article/relisons-orwell-et-huxley-206762
I think you missing that this people are true believers of them been gods and you be their subject to do with as they please. They have a long history for their deeds in the colonies they created and the methods they used as they do also to this day.
trying to find logic and reason in what they do is because always people chose to over look their deeds because hollywood make the predators into heroic figures. Corrupted people and defective DNA, you dont reason with, you just recycle it.
” A good start will be to become 52 new countries and not the abomination they are now.”
I think that breaking up the US (and possibly Canada) into smaller countries might be a good thing. Richer areas with hard working people are being forced to pay for every stupid thing while the rest, legal and illegal, live off hand outs. Money from one side of the country is sent against peoples will to subsidize things that they do not believe in. Many things are done against the will of the people. Smaller areas and special interests force their whims down the throats of everyone else.
If divisions were made, then the special interests groups could gather together and figure out ways to support themselves and their own perversions while other areas can then prosper and be left alone to enjoy their culture and community.
What I think would make more progress though, and would help more people in North America and globally would be to smash the monopolies and conglomerates that actually rule.
Let’s divide up the corporations first as see how that works out. That would be the first change that I would like to see.
“Let’s divide up the corporations first as see how that works out“
And suddenly you speak common sense. But like all humans that for some strange reason always want to start from the end coming to the beginning. dividing up the global corporations it is a don Quixote, dream that is unrealistic and not do able. That and for the rest at least 100 years… less than a miracle can not make it happen.
But the states taking control of their own future and try do something good out of a very bad, they imposed by force on them that it can be done. Starting with the basics. Since that is done then according to the new legislation they put into action and their local laws will also shape the future of the global companies. But for them to get back to size and become local it will take couple of generations, other wise if it try to be done over night, will bring great destruction to humans. Very few know any more to survive in an environment where electricity for example is not a given and water or super markets. And that what will be happening to the north americans if suddenly global companies was taken apart as they rule and supply western world. Whose population at least 80% of them are office boys and employees.
I answered to what you said now answer the one question I have make to you. You have come here out of the blue and insulted me as well pretend, you know me for years base on your claim. So who you think I am? fail to answer me and I just block you and your smart ass remarks you have made.
“But like all humans that for some strange reason always want to start from the end coming to the beginning.”
Like HardHawk you speak down to people and project yourself as being superior, and not human, with a Greek accent. That is who I know that you are. HardHawk.
“But the states taking control of their own future and try do something good out of a very bad, they imposed by force on them that it can be done. Since that is done then according to the new legislation they put into action and their local laws will also shape the future of the global companies.”
What is going to need to be done is not from new legislation. The need is to put back the legislation that is already in place that through the tricks, deception and distortion of these laws, all havoc has been let loose on the people.
These laws…
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/antitrust-laws
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws
For the time being it would be better for the USA to remain united because this fight is going to have to take place at the Federal level.
I hope for all our sakes that they win.
Good morning Apollonious. I think that once the US$ is nolonger the reserve currency it is now, a lot of the mess will be cleaned up. Most of my countrymen are just struggling to make ends meet and occasionally have a bit of relaxation. The mess going on overseas is done by the MIC, Pols and with compliance from the general media folks. The common person has little to no contact with the events abroad, because it is shielded from them. Their awakening has infuriated the elites and that is why they are deplorable in the eyes of those whole have the responsibility of controlling the country. My take on it. I wish well to you.
Brzezinski actually lived long enough to see the USA dragged into a longer and more expensive Afghanistan campaign than the Soviet one ☺?☺ for some people Hell begins when they are still alive ?
Yes, and its good to know he is currently shrieking as he is broiled for eternity in a vast steaming cauldron of boiling excrement and ejaculate while being stabbed repeatedly by demons with pointy sticks :-)
The dirty bastard deserves his fate! Karma is good…
‘ Yes, and its good to know he is currently shrieking as he is broiled for eternity in a vast steaming cauldron of boiling excrement and ejaculate while being stabbed repeatedly by demons with pointy sticks :-) ‘ …..
Wow, sounds like something written in the Talmud.
Sure is, that’s why it is so appropriate ?
Great article, I completely agree.
I don’t think it was the “lack of coordination between the local political entrepreneurs of the Russian periphery and the leadership of Western powers”. The “West” is constantly coming up with new provocations. Perhaps the Georgians were very eager but it was the “West” that built up and equipped their army and gave promises about NATO-membership. I suppose the “West” used the Georgians as useful idiots for a good provocation (with “plausible deniability”) but the Russians were victorious in a shockingly short time (5 days). I don’t think anyone had expected this. I think they expected a protracted conflict (like the Chechen one) with a lot of opportunities for further provocations, peace talks, coercion possibilities for concessions etc. Like Ukraine later. The Russians very quickly stopped the Crimean part but they were foolishly didn’t act (and still don’t, apart from lukewarm support) for the eastern parts, giving an extreme opportunity for newer and newer provocations. The Russians wanted (and still want) some kind of mutual compromise. They got all the sanctions and bad thing in return.
I agree with much of your comment. The protracted conflict would only have occurred with an extended occupation of more than 2 breakaway republics. Russia took in a million refuges that the Ukraine government probably doesn’t want back. Which may be a factor in the ongoing negations. And they got Crimea without any conflict which is a big plus and isn’t going back. There is also a bad history from the Bolsheviki Jews which complicates matters.
Yes, Russia should have occupied southern and eastern Ukraine immediately after the Odessa massacre while the Russian speaking majority was outraged. They probably could have repatriated the entire Donbass and Black Sea coast with little or no combat, as they did with Crimea. Now they have left it too late, hoping for an internal rebellion that is unlikely to come given the heavily armed US backed Nazi militias that suppress any resistance to the Nazi coup. At the least they should formally recognize South Osettia and Novorossia as sovereign governments and open formal diplomatic relations with them, including signing a mutual defence treaty which would allow the stationing of Russian troops in Donetsk and Lugansk. That could put an end to the Ukrainian army shelling of Donetsk and Lugansk.
“Yes, Russia should have occupied southern and eastern Ukraine immediately after the Odessa massacre while the Russian speaking majority was outraged.” What is the point of occupation of Novorossiya when they will join the RF as new members like Crimea? Banderised Ukraine and its subservience to the “European values” must run its rotten course to its logical conclusion. What force makes the UAF and the Neo-Nazi militias fire artillery rounds on their own cities in the Donbass? And some of these perps are from Novorossiya!!! I only wish that every such round would be answered with the destruction of the perps as has happened with those attacking Damascus and other Syrian cities. Ukraine can only liberate itself, when it has the same wish as Syria.
when you occupy a country, then it comes the task to have to keep it against the populations wishes and is when it gets tricky. Something the UK/Usrael never learn.
The Russian forces could have taken Tblisi and achieved what? Instead, South Ossetia and Abkhasia that want to be part of RF were protected and recognised. The Georgians were allowed to asslick the US/EU/NATO gang. There is no point in occupying former Soviet states, even Ukraine. Banderised Ukraine has to see to the full that asslicking the US/EU/NATO gangsters only has the smelly brown stuff fall on your faces. This is being realised by a wide range of countries like Turkey, Pakistan and even my own birth country of India.
More and more nationalists are gathering here
You have a problem with people who love their homeland kid, above anything else?
are you my stalker? lol
self flattery will get you no where retard. Been an idiot as you seem to be you dont worth the effort.
please ignore me and my comments, I can’t stand your barbarism
Sorry… I can not discriminate, against amoebas.
I am a Nationalist, problem ?.
your problem lol
Yup, I am very much a nationalist, who supports Trump’s attempt at dialogue with Russia, the freedom of UK with Brexit and the destruction of multinational empires like EU and NATO that expand like the plague and project power for the billionaire class.
I support all these ideas and I think I am a good patriot, but nationalism no!
There is very little difference between patriotism and nationalism. We all should be proud of our countries of birth in way that makes the world a better place for life NOT war. There is nothing wrong in trying to get the best deal for your nation, unless that leads to mass poverty or even starvation for weaker countries. This is would be the moral dimension to an America first, Britain first or EU first agricultural policy. What I do very much oppose is the sentiment of “my country right or wrong” or “Deutschland uber alles” complex. I do condemn the concept of supremacy of one race, one nation, one tribe, one man, one civilisation, one military bloc. That way leads to nuclear destruction and the extinction of mankind.
I support every word in your text above except the first phrase. I still believe that patriotism and nationalism are wide apart as political meanings.
By all means dance on a pin head. I laughed at the Mandleson attempt to call Brexiters anti-foreigners as I myself was born in India and have had the pleasure of living in London for the last 50 years. Call me what you like, but I fully support an independent and proud UK that recovers its confidence and vitality that it lost as the Nazis were about to invade in WW2 and Churchill was desperate to get the US into the war. My pro-EU stance was changed very suddenly on 22 February 2014 when the ELECTED President of my beloved Ukraine was violently removed by the US/EU/NATO combine. The time for alliances with violent and expansionist supremacist entities such as the US, EU and NATO is over. I am actually beginning to see London UK as the capital of the new multi-polar world where world powers such as UK, Russia, China, India, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, US, EU (the Germanic Euro Empire), etc can meet and govern the world from neutral and formerly imperial ground. All speaking English, drinking gin and tonic or tea, and with their central banks having a second HQ in the City of London. London: G20 capital! Man, what a vision! Does the UK still have the spark of freedom to chuck out the US after all these years of slavery since 1940 and being subsumed in the EU since 1973?
Weird, I think back to the Georgian war as really serious, because it was a US approved and monitored test attack directly at Russia itself. I appreciate it was a Russian enclave, but it was like a feint, to see if, and how Russia would respond. The USA collected a lot of data showing gaps in the Russian response that might be exploited in the future.
Since then, Russia has needed to modernise, and plug gaps in it’s forces.
I still don’t know what the Georgian war was all about from the US side, other than some type of urgent intelligence gathering feint, before the Republicans lost the opportunity. A way of gathering data, so that Defense contractors and military could continue with development whilst the republicans were out of power.
Or perhaps a last ditch attempt to drag the next administration into a conflict. Although I’m very skeptical about that.
Part way through the Obama administration, the US military was back with the most ambitious spy satellite launch program that had been undertaken for many many years. They launched some really heavy satellites, and lots of them.
Back to Georgia; and its war! Why no mention of Israel’s part in Geogia? Georgia’s military was being supplied by both U S and Israel, and its trading was done by both Israeli and US military and both their corporate private security forces. The energy supply routes and geographic position of Georgia was the incentive for foreign intervention. Let’s not forget the damn historical backgrounds of culture and political structuring of the Georgian population, a historicly and still presently a corrupt to the core barbaric, backwards and bigoted grouping with modern .weaponry. Politics is always local, and just because foreign aid and money floods in does not mean there was any mass objections by Georgian people to the attacking by them upon a people they looked down upon as of no more consequence than dumb animals. One man, or one small group of people needs, like seeds in garden, the soil to grow its toxic weeds and as in every nation in ME, Africa, and Central Asia, the people’s and cultures are rich in volunteer seedlings. To always lay blame on a few individuals is to play into the hands of power, the powers behind the scenes remain mostly hidden, and their dumb as cattle populations always support. Russia found out just how corrupt and antiquated its military, infrastructure and equipment was as a good 1/3 of planes and heavy trucks and armor ended up as no more than parts to be stripped in order to get the rest of gear into conflict area. Their infantry began stripping from the dead, rations , uniforms, web gear and even boots, because the Israel and US supplied gear was far better than their political/ private corp/ military leaders could supply them with. Today Georgia is a much more economic and military threat to Russia proper than it was back then, especiallyw in how they like backasswards Ukraine have no individual sovereignty, long sold out to highest bidders of Israel/ US and NATO nations. Do their populace care where money comes from, not one damn whit, and their own cultural backwardness is of own making. Dream on all you who think US is failing and Russia and China are looking out for some pie in sky altruistic future for the world’s herd animals.
“The West”, well, some of it, simply uses smaller nations that, understandably, want to get away from a Russian dictate, the drive wedges into the continental power(s). Has been like that for ages. See also Afghanistan (quite successully). Yes, Afghanistan is a huge success. Continuous fighting, instability, that is good. Sell weapons, get opium (Afghanistan is by far the largest producer) + having your military sit on the largest reserves of rare earths in the world. Control potential pipelines, stand between India, China, Iran and on the soft underbelly of Russia. It couldn’t be greater. Georgia is interesting again, because it’s on Russia’s south flank, near Turkey and, importantly, near to good old Azerbaidjan’s oil (not to mention Iran). Lovely. Stirring up any kind of trouble there will be profitable. Russia etc. have everything to lose, ‘the (some) West’ has everything to gain.