US Sharing the Blame
For Russia Invading Georgia

A Financial Times article (August 14, 2008), titled, “The West Shares the Blame for Georgia,” and stated:

The bloody conflict over South Ossetia teaches two lessons. The first is that George will never now get South Ossetia and Abkhazia back. The second is for the west: it is not to make promises that it neither can, nor will, fulfils when push comes to shove.

Georgia will not get its separatist provinces back.  The populations and leaderships of these regions have repeatedly demonstrated their desire to separate from Georgia; and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, made it clear again and again that Russia would fight to defend these regions if Georgian forces attacked them.

Western governments should exert pressure on Georgia to accept this solution. These governments have a duty to do this because they, and most especially the US, bear a considerable share of the responsibility for sthe Georgian assault on South Ossetia and deserve the humiliation they are now suffering.

The Bush administration, with the full support of the US Congress, armed, trained and overwhelmingly financed the Georgian military. It did this although the dangers of war involving these forces were obvious and after the Georgian government had told its own people that these forces were intended for the recovery of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The Bush administration, backed by Congress, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and most of the US media also adopted ahighly uncritical attitude to bother the undemocratic and the chauvinist aspects of the Saakashvili administration and its growing resemblance to that of the crazed nationalist leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, in the early 1990s.

Instead, according to European officials, the Bush administration even put heavy pressure on US and international monitoring groups not to condemn flagrant abuses by Mr. Saakashvili’s supporters during the last Georgian elections. Ossete and Abkhaz concerns were ignored, and the origins of the conflict were often wittingly or unwittingly falsified in accordance with Georgian propaganda.

Finally, and most importantly, the US pushed strongly for a Nato membership action plan for Georgia at the last alliance summit and would have achieved this if France and Germany had not resisted strongly.

Given all this, it was not wholly unreasonable of Mr. Saakashvili to assume that if he started a war with Russia and was defeated, the US would come to his aid.

Add to these aggravations, the Bush administration plans to install U.S. operated nuclear missile sites in Rumania and Hungary further aggravated Russia.

With U.S. forces stationed in Germany, in Japan, in Korea, decades after a prior conflict, and U.S. provocations in the area of Russia, prior threats against China related to Taiwan, sooner or later U.S. politicians will provode a nuclear attack upon the United States.