Bush and Saakashvili, on the road to confrontation with Russia

Even though the government of the Russian Federation ordered a cease fire in Southern Ossetia and Georgia, after the Russian Army contained the Georgian aggressor and expelled its army from Ossetia territory, in that remote region of the world, the Caucasus, the Third World War could be brewing, according to specialists and analysts from the Latin American Circle for International Studies (LACIS), a civil society organization based out of Mexico City, dedicated to research, analysis, and reflection.
A global conflagration, in which at some point nuclear weapons could enter into the fray, would mark the end of humanity, the LACIS specialists pointed out.
The main instigator of this serious threat to humanity is and has been Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, encouraged, egged on, and supported by the United States and its closest NATO allies. His criminal blindness has reached the point that even after the Russian government accepted the cease-fire and displayed its willingness to begin negotiations on the future of Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia, with absolute respect for the free will of the peoples involved, Saakashvili demanded that the United States “move from words to action”, clearly in reference to a military response against the Russian Federation.
Saakashvili took office though fraudulent elections and in terms of his behavior, features, and characteristics appears to bring together two of the most sinister and despicable figures of world history, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
With Stalin, his fellow countryman (whose real name was Josef Vissarionovich Dugashvilli), Saakashvili shares cunningness, cruelty, and treachery. With Hitler, cynicism, dehumanization, cowardice, and lying.
International public opinion should have been on red alert when last year, in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, as well as in the rest of the country, Saakashvili brutally crushed the protests over the blatant electoral fraud that brought him into power.
Then, as now, the United States mobilized its powerful propaganda and disinformation machinery to silence the numerous dissident voices and distort the reality of the situation. But if the harassment against Russia persists and new belligerent hostile moves are made in the area, nuclear weapons might even wind up being employed.
Georgia has become a docile instrument of Washington and occupies a very important position within the geostrategical and geopolitical plans of the White House and the Pentagon. Such policies are aimed at dominating the Caucasus and its energy resources and isolating Russia through an increasingly tight military grip.
On August 8, while in the Olympic games were being inaugurated in Beijing, Saakashvili, with his accustomed hypocrisy, after reiterating his peaceful intentions toward Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia, independent-minded lands that are opposed to belonging to the Georgian State, launched merciless and top-heavy attacks, in which peace forces, backed by different international agencies and institutions, were involved. These included the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the peace forces were comprised of Russian, Ossetian, and Georgian military units (the Georgian soldiers betrayed and attacked their colleagues, once the order from Tbilisi arrived).
The Georgian forces committed all types of imaginable excesses in Southern Ossetia, where more than 90 percent of the population holds a Russian passport and whose people want to join the Russian Federation. The Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of Ossetia, described as a genocidal act and a war crime by Russian officials and other eyewitness observers, resulted in the slaughter of at least two thousand civilians. The Georgians were enraged with the civilian population and they shot not only some 15 Russian soldiers belonging to the peace forces who had been injured, but also dozens of civilians.
The fact that Georgia, supported by the United States and its closest allies, was the only one responsible for the criminal provocation that led to the Russian response, has been deliberately hidden by most of the Western news media.
These same media outlets have not hesitated in appealing to the most grotesque falsifications to align international public opinion behind the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and their client-state, Georgia, according to Canadian commentator Ross Wilcox, from the Global Abolition Caucus, an international network of non-governmental organizations committed to peace and disarmament.
The examples of such media manipulation are numerous. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has insisted that thousands of civilians were killed in Georgia, with the obvious inference that they were Georgian victims of the Russian troops, when in fact they were Ossetians, murdered in Southern Ossetia by the Georgian army.
The CNN has broadcast images throughout the world of a partially destroyed city, with numerous cadavers and even more wounded victims in the streets and in ruined homes, saying that they correspond to the Georgian city of Gori (the cradle, by the way, of Stalin); but these videotapes were made in Tskhinvali following the Georgian attack.
The prestigious U.S. newspaper The New York Times has affirmed that George W. Bush’s administration encouraged Saakashvili, through increasingly generous military assistance, a program of combined military maneuvers whose most recent expression occurred just this past July, and the obstinate insistence to make Georgia a full member of NATO.
Spanish journalist Rafael Poch, correspondent in Beijing for the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia, commented that with the world’s attention “concentrated on the games in Beijing and Vladimir Putin attending their inauguration, Washington’s calculation was that the Georgian president could resolve the question of Southern Ossetia in 24 hours and do so irreversibly.”
There is irrefutable evidence that the Georgian army attack on Southern Ossetia had the blessing of U.S. President George W. Bush. In July, the United States, Georgia, and Ukraine conducted military maneuvers in Georgian territory. For the past three years, Georgia has been modernizing its armed forces with the total backing of the United States, which has a total of 129 “military advisors” in the country.
Georgia has exponentially increased its military spending and earmarked more than one billion dollars for the purchase of weapons from Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, and the United States, included Stinger surface-to-air missiles, manufactured in the United States.
The attack began at 11:53pm on the evening of Thursday, August 7, with Grad artillery fire and bombers. Ten villages on the outskirts of the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali were razed and the capital city was considerably destroyed in the attack.
The UN peace keeping battalion deployed in that city was comprised of about 300 troops, Russians, Ossetians, and Georgians. The Georgian troops fired on their fellow soldiers, with 12 winding up dead. At 3pm on the afternoon of Friday, August 8, Tskhinvali was taken by the Georgian army, but the remains of the peace keeping battalion and other troops managed to maintain their strength and they kept control of the vital tunnel that connects the area with Russia.
One hour later, at 4pm in the afternoon, the 58th Russian Army division began its march toward Southern Ossetia from Vladikavkaz, in response to the request for help from Russia issued shortly before by Ossetian President Edward Kokoity. Around 8pm on the evening of August 8, the Russian army entered Ossetian territory.
“If Georgia had occupied Southern Ossetia in 24 hours, it would have proclaimed the reestablishment of ‘constitutional order ' and Washington would have sanctioned it,” Poch said, “but the plans did not turn out as expected.”
The current military grip of the United States and NATO on Russia is tighter than in the Soviet period. Half of the 14 former Soviet republics currently have a U.S. or NATO military presence in their country. Even Ukraine is defined as part of the U.S. “security zone”. The framework of strategic agreements with regards to non-proliferation and disarmament (ABM and START) has been shattered.
The deployment of an antimissile shield supposedly against Iran, which began in Central Europe, “is the most boldfaced and absurd fraud that could be imagined,” said Poch. In response to such levels of concealed aggression, the Russians will have to defend themselves.
Meanwhile, international public opinion should demand that the International Court of Justice initiate judicial proceedings against Saakashvili, for the crimes of genocide and for being a war criminal. The actions of others such as Slobodan Milosevic or Radovan Karadzic pale in comparison with Saakashvilli.