Posted on 08/13/2008 8:29:27 AM PDT by SJackson
I’m not sure if I’m more amused or irritated by the sudden rash of articles mentioning America’s “lack of force reserves” in some respect, as though if we were not involved in Iraq and/or Afghanistan we would have shuttled a couple hundred thousand men and women over to Georgia in this situation, or would have in any way pitted our men and equipment directly against the Russians.
Do you think we would have been compelled to send ground troops if it were the Czechs (NATO members), instead of someone getting ready to join NATO?
How close an ally does someone have to be, in your opinion before they justify that kind of support?
It’s a very long read & I have not digested all of it yet. The first point regarding the timing of the Georgian move into South Ossetia and the Russian move into Georgia raises questions of why Georgia moved, and whether the United States approved.
My take is that the Georgians knew the Russians were massing forces, and had reliable intel that the Russians intended to formally occupy and annex South Ossetia. The Georgian move was intended to be a quick pre-emption of that, to occupy South Ossetia before the Russians moved in, and that Russia would not dare to engage in direct conflict with Georgian troops. Georgia may have believed it could expect more support from the U.S. than it was actually going to get, or that the Russians believed that a direct conflict with Georgian troops could bring the United States into direct conflict with Russia. A pretty big gamble, to be sure.
It didn’t pay off; the Russians knew that during a presidential election year, the United States would not do anything militarily to assist Georgia. The Russians have been looking for an excuse to reassert themselves in the old imperial provinces. The Georgian miscalculation played right into their hands, and all the Russians had to do was carry out the operation they had already planned and prepared.
Did the United States approve of Georgia’s occupation of South Ossetia? I doubt it, but I would not be surprised if somewhere in Foreign Ministry files in Tbilisi there are some vague letters from the United States Ambassador with internal memos attached, documenting that the Georgians thought they had such blessing.
That’s my short term take.
I don't know, but those are questions that will have to be answered.
We've been training the Georgian military for years, and had a 1,600 man training mission on the ground which left the day before Georgia moved. If we didn't know, that's a depressing intelligence failure. If we did encourage them, that was clearly foolish. Without expecting American support, I can't imagine what Georgia was thinking. The Russian response wasn't organized in 24 hours, both Georgia and the US had to know about the Russian mobilization.
My opinion only, GWB should have expanded the size of the military years ago, certainly before Iraq. You'll find threads from those days questioning our ability to fight a three front war, though places like Taiwan and South Korea were the most frequent speculation, not Georgia. That's not to suggest we should be militarily involved in Georgia, but the fact that the military option is largely closed to us other than in the most extreme cases encourages despots.
Good post.
Who would’ve believed that Clinton would even lie to the Russians. /sarcasm
“Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region.”
And by re-establishing the Russian sphere of influence, this means replacing democratically elected governments with non-democratic, kleptocratic Russian puppet governments with no free press (ie, the Soveit Union). Russia is just another autocratic third world nation with oil.
Maybe now would be a good time to sort out our little problem in Cuba.
Two factors led to this.
One was the desire for payback on Kosovo. They were looking for the right time and place to make their point.
The second was the desire to exclude the US from what they view as their sphere of influence. Again, they were looking for the best time and place to make that point.
Either of those factors put Georgia on the line. Both of them together guaranteed something was going to happen.
I am shocked that we didn’t see this coming. This looks like an intel failure. Someone didn’t do the analysis all the way through.
Personally I'm not big on adding countries to NATO, but if the US was going to draw a line in the sand here, not getting Georgia into NATO was a diplomatic failure.
No doubt. And such "April Glaspie-grams" from the State Department don't even seem to require the President's knowledge or approval.
How come everyone is criticizing U.S. and not the Europeans?
Have they lost all their will to fight?
I guess they just want to be blackmailed into cowardice by Russia’s control of their energy.
You answered your own question, they haven’t the will. And if they did, they haven’t the ability to project force.
I told others in 2004 that the discussion of Ukraine entering Nato was a direct challenge to Russia and that pushing in this area was folly. Our nation has indeed overstreched, we attempted globalization on such scale 40 years too early. America should go energy independent as national importance, indluding drilling. We will no doubt square off some day against the Russian bear. For now, there is time. But if we dilly-dally on energy we can expect very serious consequences a few short years from now.
The US folly on globalization: Pride cometh before the fall. Every empire feels they have become immortal at a point, ovextends and receeds. The good news is that we receed back to our focus of our own borders in many ways, that we will finally focus on fixing our own broken house before we go over there and attempt to fix there’s.
No, it wasn’t an intel failure it was a false perception failure.
What else is new. Let the Europeans pay for there own defense. We are now broke.
A long read but the quality isn’t there. After reading the first several paragraphs there are some substantive factual errors.
By why quibble with those. The conclusion is fairly absurd. This guy is claiming that Russia is “announcing...its status...as a world power...”, by invading a country of 4 million people. I mean honestly, we used to worry about the Soviets rolling the Central Plains of Europe in 3 days from Russia to the coast of France.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.