Posted on 08/31/2008 10:31:48 AM PDT by FreeReign
[Excerpt]....“So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which is Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a crescent shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian peacekeepers and Georgian peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The Ossetians were dug in in the town, and the Georgians were in the forests and the fields between the town and the villages. The Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by shelling Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it's a classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians offered repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke.
“On August 3, the head of the local administration says he's evacuating his civilians. You also need to know one thing: you may be wondering what these areas live off, especially in Ossetia, there's no industry there. Georgia is poor, but Ossetia is poorer. It's basically a smuggler's paradise. There was a sting operation that netted three kilograms of highly enriched uranium. There are fake hundred dollar bills to the tune of at least 50 million dollars that have been printed. [South Ossetian “President” Eduard] Kokoity himself is a former wrestler and a former bodyguard who was promoted to the presidency by powerful Ossetian families as their puppet. What does that mean in practice? It means that if you are a young man, you have no choice. You can either live in absolute misery, or you can take the government's dime and join the militia. It happened in both territories.
“On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been dishing out passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have to do is present your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you get a Russian passport on the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to get a Russian passport, you have the normal procedure to follow, and it takes years. So suddenly you have a lot of Ossetian militiamen and Abkhaz militiamen with Russian passports in effect paid by Russian subsidies.
“So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children should leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day, irregulars – Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks – start coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don't do anything. They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.”
“Can I stop you for a second?” I said. I was still under the impression that the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President Saakashvili started it when he sent troops into South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. What was all this about the Ossetian violence on August 6 and before?
He raised his hand as if to say stop.
“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”
“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”
“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”
“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.
“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”
Thomas Goltz nodded.
[End Excerpt]
See entire article for additional interesting background info.
thank you for this
Anybody that cries poor Russia must be from a left wing
city or country.
You're welcome. I got the heads-up on it from Valin.
Correction...I should say Stultis.
Okay, so the Russians anticipated and are at least 50 percent culpable, I wouldn’t doubt one bit, but how is this drastically different from U.S. provoking war with Great Britain in 1812? Or with Indian Tribes from the 1776 to 1890? Or with Mexico in 1846, or with Spain in 1898? Or, as some would have it, by letting Japan hit us at Pearl Harbor in 1941, so as to justify going full bore in the Pacific and in Europe?
I just keep getting wind in a lot of the Western press of the “holier than thou” attitudes that very conveniently blank out any parallels to our own oftentimes questionable historical record (all-in-all, though, certainly still scoring an overall ‘A’ in this world.) Sure, the Rooskiis are pissed off and acting like big gorillas who just fell out of trees, but our own history, as much as we’d like to dress it up, oftentimes approximates this sort of ugliness, so why all the hypocritical hand-wringing?
Anticipated?
and are at least 50 percent culpable
Math is hard.
“Okay, so the Russians anticipated and are at least 50 percent culpable”
50% culpable?
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