Posted on 08/20/2008 10:51:36 PM PDT by Bokababe
It's not just Misha. It's most Georgians.
"This is absolute missstatement of facts: I personally know Ambasssador Teft and he would have never said anything like this."
You are absolutely correct and I did accidentally misstate that -- it was the US Ambassador to Russia that I was referring to.
But, I didn't get that information from "Russian newspapers", I got it from IHT here on FR and on Reuters.
As for the "denial" of the Ambassador's remarks, it was so quiet that I actually had to go to the US Embassy in Moscow's website in order to find it, where the Ambassador himself actually says nothing -- but a blurb on the site says something about "a mistranslation of the Ambassador's remarks" and nothing more. That's actually US State Department speak for "Our Ambassador shot off his mouth when he shouldn't have, so now we are shutting him up".
Are you with the Georgian government, Lasha? Just curious, given that you know the US Ambassador to Georgia, personally.
As for your remarks regarding oil routes on your other post to me, I will do my homework in order to respond thoughtfully.
Please understand, Lasha, despite accusations to the contrary here, I have no particular "love of Russia".
However, just as you love Georgia, I love my country, the USA. And I have seen a globalist agenda that seems to keep us in perpetual wars which solve nothing, just lead to the next war, until America has nearly been bankrupted.
The American people are an idealistic people who do fight for principles, not profit, but we are so naive that we are vulnerable to being manipulated into what is NOT good for our country, but is good for the globalists agenda and globalist bank accounts. And I, for one, am sick of having my chain jerked and us leaping into battle and throwing ourselves on a grenade with no forethought of what is good for America.
My resistance to Kosovo independence was that once we broke international treaties in redrawing borders, it gave others (in this case, Russia) to do the same. If were fighting "for Serbia" (where I have never set foot), I'd be telling Serbia to keep their head down and shut up until we get tired of it and go home. This was never "about Serbia" to me, it was about America and the international precedents that were set by Kosovo independence that led to this Georgian crisis, with GWB looking like a babbling idiot defending "Georgian sovereignty" and "inviolable principles of a country's sovereignty" when he just spit on Serbian sovereignty "inviolable principles of a country's sovereignty" six months ago.
Messing with a country's sovereignty (the national equivalent of a country's "private property rights") was wrong then and it's wrong now, but the US no longer has real world credibility on that issue. It cost us credibility and we got nothing out of it -- except to enrich George Soros further.
Without international rule of law via treaties and honoring agreements we've signed, all we have left is a war of words and ultimately brute force. Seems to me that we should be smarter than this.
Ronald Reagan broke the Soviet Union by getting the Soviets to outspend us in competition until they ultimately went broke, without ever militarily attacking the SU at all -- because if we had attacked, Georgia would probably still be radioactive pile of rubble right now instead of "arguing over S. Ossetia & Abkhazia".
Shakaashvili is your president, he's not mine. It is absolutely the correct thing to do for Americans to look at our interests, Georgia's interests, Russia's interests, and figure out what the right thing to do is from our perspective -- and not go charging off half-cocked because some globalist cheerleading squad in DC have convinced our politicians that we should. We need to be smarter than that, especially when we reach beyond our borders.
Google neo-eurasionism and a man named Alexander Dugin.
Well, of course they do! If I were Georgian, I'd want to be "aligned with the US" and "away from Russia", too! Who wouldn't?
But we can't "relocate Georgia" to another hemisphere. Russia is their next-door neighbor, whether we like it or not. And given how far the US is committed militarily elsewhere and how far in debt we are from the last wars, just what do you think that can we do that doesn't put our own US security at risk?
Because if we do something half-assed and then abandon Georgia, Georgians are going to be the ones left as Russia's whipping boy.
We in the US have more enemies in the world than we do real friends these days (and by "real friends", I don't mean paid toadies). Do we need another enemy, especially one as formidable as Russia? And can we afford it -- militarily, financially, internationally? And what if a real threat to us comes along while the rest of Western Civilization is busy killing each other off? Then what?
Why is it that I feel like I am the only one here looking at this issue like a grown up, in terms of what we've got, what we can do and what we are risking?
Actually both Reuters and other reported this from an article published in Moscow. But I do not agree with you on misstatement by the ambassador and department of state trying to shut him up, and not only because someone (I cannot really identify) who personally knows US ambassador in Moscow told me that there is no way he would have said this - it is because Russians tend to understand things only the way they want; a very good example occurred only on Sunday, when a conversation between Sarkozy and Medvedev was somehow interpreted differently by statement issued by Medvedev’s administration, infuriating Sarkozy to the extent that from what I have heard, he called urgent meeting of the heads of EU countries for the beginning of September.
Re all your other points, well, for what it is worth, BTW, Georgia did not recognize Kosovo’s independence, and insofar I am concerned, I really do not have much information to make sound judgments on this; all I know is information from couple of briefings I attended.
And in one of other discussions here I posted something which was later reposted by other members: no one expects USA to fight wars for us here in Georgia and this is the last thing I would ever want. But I also know too damn well what Russia is all about and we have been screaming on the top of our lungs about it but no one listened: they are not going to engage into war with entire world, and there is no way they are deploying nukes against USA or anyone else because they know it is their doomsday;
Couple of points, actually, from this very campaign here: while repeated bombings of various military and civil installations in Georgia (making sure that everything was gone), they rather superficially dropped two bombs nearby Vaziani base and also two bombs in Ajara, pretty much damaging couple of trees. you know why? because in Vaziani there were couple of US servicemen stationed, and in Ajara, from what I was told under 1921 or something like this treaty Turkey has retained right to protect Ajara in case of Soviet invasion and actually there were reports here of two tank regiments from Turkey advancing...
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