The Cold War II Has Officially Begun

[ILay]

Ron,

your basic problem is that you
- do not make a research on the facts before declaring something
- do not realize that your imperialistic ideas will not live long - Iraq / Iran / Afghanistan are all US projects to settle Russia down in the 80s. Would you really want to have them having nuclear arms now? Why don't you just try to read what the leaders of Georgia and (i.e) Poland say now. Do you realize if such guys have nuclear arms they would simply make _your_ country attacked quite soon?

Ron, I do not care abut some talked values. I care about the reality. You know _me_ and what I stand for, why not come to Sth. Ossethia and Georgia personally and writing a frank report for us all?
I do the sponsorship.

[GHOST OF RONBO]

Originally Posted by ILay

Ron,

your basic problem is that you
- do not make a research on the facts before declaring something
- do not realize that your imperialistic ideas will not live long - Iraq / Iran / Afghanistan are all US projects to settle Russia down in the 80s. Would you really want to have them having nuclear arms now? Why don't you just try to read what the leaders of Georgia and (i.e) Poland say now. Do you realize if such guys have nuclear arms they would simply make _your_ country attacked quite soon?

Ron, I do not care abut some talked values. I care about the reality. You know _me_ and what I stand for, why not come to Sth. Ossethia and Georgia personally and writing a frank report for us all?
I do the sponsorship.

ILay:

I think I have been objective about Russia's invasion of tiny Georgia, but I would like to walk over the ground and talk to the troops on both sides, so I accept your kind and generous offer. I believe you have my Email address.

OPINION By The Wall Street Journal - America's leading Right Wing Newspaper

Russia Is Still a Hungry Empire
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
August 19, 2008; Page A17

The sight of Russian tanks rolling through Georgia was shocking yet familiar. Images flash back of Chechnya in 1994 and '99, Vilnius '91, Afghanistan '79, Prague '68, Hungary '56. Before that the Soviet invasions, courtesy of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, of Poland and the Baltics in '39 and '40. Kazaks, Azeris, Tajiks, Ukrainians remember -- from family stories and national lore -- their own subjugation to Russian rule.

Other empires such as Britain and France adjusted, not without difficulty, to the fall of their distant domains. Far more of Russia's essence is tied up in the Imperium, and it barely tried to find a new identity after the Soviet Union fell. The war in Georgia marks an easy return to territorial expansion (here Moscow has taken chunks of Georgia for itself) and attempted regional dominance.

Russia is a relatively young nation, dating from after the turn of the previous millennium. Drive the highway from Gori to Tbilisi and you'll find signs of Christianity that predate Russia by some five centuries. Georgians will tell you, with a mixture of pride and scorn, that their culture and history goes back a lot deeper than Russia's.

Starting out as an isolated village, Muscovy grew by conquest, swallowing up lands and people at a dizzying rate, especially from the 18th century on. Though Russian nationalists claim otherwise, as a nation the Russians are a mix of Slavic, Asian and other European ethnicities. This national hodgepodge was wrenched together by an authoritarian czar who claimed his right to rule from the heavens.

The Soviets were even better empire builders. Vladimir Putin, whose formative years were spent in Dresden spying on the East German colonials, comes from this tradition.

Never in the history of empire was the periphery generally so much more advanced than the center. With each move into Europe, from the partitions of Poland to Stalin's great triumph at Yalta, Russia acquired what it didn't have -- an industrialized economic base, better infrastructure and above all contact with Western civilization. Aside from St. Petersburg and a few other towns, Russia itself stayed a largely rural, Eastern Orthodox backwater. It knew it too.

In the Soviet days, Russian culture, language and history were pressed on its captive nations. But these nations in and outside the U.S.S.R. never gave up their dreams of freedom. Starting in the Baltics, and then spreading to the Caucasus and Ukraine, their resurgence was, as much if not more than Mikhail Gorbachev, the internal force that brought about the Soviet Union's collapse. They easily imagined life without Mother Russia. Russia could not reciprocate. To dominate is to be.

Boris Yeltsin tried to give Russians an alternative narrative. For his own political survival he had to stoke a Russian reawakening against the Soviet behemoth. After leading the charge against the 1991 putsch, Yeltsin put forward democracy as a unifying and legitimizing idea for the new Russian state. But that went up in smoke with the shelling of the Russian parliament in 1993, the first Chechen war and the rise of the oligarchs.

Yeltsinism was fully discredited by the time Vladimir Putin took over. He doesn't give the impression he ever believed in its main precepts of partnership with the West and freedom at home. For a while, Mr. Putin pushed some economic modernization, including cleaning up the tax code. His instinct, however, led him toward the past. The so-called humiliations of the Yeltsin era, which to most Westerners who lived there then looks like a golden era of relative normalcy, called for vengeance. The young democracies around Russia that chose a future in the West were to be forced back into Moscow's sphere of influence.

It is curious to hear Russia invoke the Kosovo precedent to justify its invasion of Georgia. There is an unintended parallel. Two former communist apparatchiks (Mr. Putin and Slobodan Milosevic) took over weakened, demoralized countries and thought expansionist nationalism would lead them to glory.

The second Chechen war consolidated the Putin hold on power in 1999 -- as stirring up the Serbs in Kosovo did for Milosevic in the late 1980s. The Serbs were then like the Russians are today. A European nation, though somewhat set apart by Orthodox Christianity, that opts out of the Western mainstream. This choice, alas, requires victims like Kosovo Albanians or Georgians -- small nations whose fate the outside world might ignore.

The images from Georgia brought me back to a late May evening 12 years ago in Murmansk, the seat of Russia's Northern Fleet. There ahead of elections, I'd met a smart and amiable teacher in the Russian Arctic city who, true to his nation's reputation for hospitality, invited me home for vodka and some dinner.

Hours into our meeting I'd mentioned that perhaps Russia, then looking for its place, might aspire to become something like prosperous Norway just across the border from Murmansk -- a country able to provide its people a good life. It stopped him cold. In this grim setting, my new friend spat in disgust and said, "Russia is no Norway. It is a great power. It is destined to be great." Mr. Putin would doubtless agree.

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board

[free2decide]

Congragulations ! Abakazia and South Ossetia for the well deserved independence.

Mark

Melbourne

[GHOST OF RONBO]

Well it took Putin long enough to FINALLY blame the USA for his ordered invasion of Georgia on August 8th.


Putin suggests U.S. role in Georgia clash - International Herald Tribune

I suppose he got the idea from reading my first post in this thread in which I said that it would only be a question of time before America would be blamed for the invasion.

I'll tell you what folks, as a former member U.S. Army Military Intelligence I know these Russian Commies and The New York Traitor Times like I know every inch of my glorious naked body!

As Russia struggled to rally international support for its military action in Georgia, Vladimir Putin, the country's paramount leader, lashed out at the United States on Thursday, contending that the White House may have orchestrated the conflict to benefit one of the candidates in the American presidential election.

Putin's comments in a television interview, his most extensive to date on Russia's decision to send troops into Georgia earlier this month, sought to present the military operation as a response to brazen, cold war-style provocations by the United States. In tones that seemed alternately angry and mischievous, he suggested that the Bush administration may have tried to create a crisis that would influence American voters in the choice of a successor to President George W. Bush.

"The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this conflict on purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates in the competitive race for the presidency in the United States," Putin said in an interview with CNN.

He added, "They needed a small victorious war."

Putin did not specify which candidate he had in mind, but there was no doubt that he was referring to Senator John McCain, the Republican. McCain is loathed in the Kremlin because he has a close relationship with Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and has called for imposing stiff penalties on Russia, including throwing it out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations.

[Ivan_25]

The Russian Bear is the aggressor in my humble opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of Americans to include President Bush. What great danger could a small nation of 3.5 million pose to the largest country in the world with a population of 150 million?

Ron. You are talking here about THOUGHTS. I tell you about FACTS.

The fact is that Georgia attacked FIRST. Easy to check out. Try. You really cannot see this, or you just do not want to?

[calanorn]

i read these forums from time to time and generally have not found a need to sign up or post. but to say georgia attacked first? those of you who do please provide me evidence of an attack against russia??

I see they attacked S.O which is georgian land putin and his lap dog can take there so called independant S.O and put it back where it slid out from. i never once saw an attack against russia. apart from possibly the deaths of the russian peace keepers but i have seen suprisingly little on that part of the story so if its true or not i do not know. if i remember rightly there are georgian troops in the peacekeeping force?? so i doubt the selling was deliberately aimed at the peacekeepers again not a warrant for a russian land grab.

the idea of russians protecting there own citizens then you do what every other country does and advise your citizens to leave the country in question. so the idea that georgia attacked first is garbage. they attacked a seperatist faction within there own nation. Russia is the one who invaded a country and took control of there land, airspace and waters

As for russia this righteous course that S.O should be independant is a land grab by them do you really believe if a region of russia wanted to defect from russian rule they would sit by whilst it happened??

O and isnt it russia who split N.O and S.O in the first place???

[GHOST OF RONBO]

Originally Posted by Ivan_25

Ron. You are talking here about THOUGHTS. I tell you about FACTS.

The fact is that Georgia attacked FIRST. Easy to check out. Try. You really cannot see this, or you just do not want to?

Facts? We Americans have a saying, "In war the first casualty is the truth."

So If you believe the Putin drivel you very likely believe that Stalin attacked Germany on June 22, 1941...Interesting that today Russia has become FASCIST..Shocking when you consider over 20 million Russians died fighting German fascism.

And that dear friend is CHANGE you can believe in...

HEIL PUTIN!