http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20554.htm
Who started Cold War II? By Patrick J. Buchanan 19/08/08 "WND" -- - The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO. Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war. >From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly. Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter's response to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did - nothing. These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians. The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad. Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far. And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire? As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West? For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow. If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us? The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him. What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin's trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light? Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation. The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi. The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way. Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic. A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia. Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe? As for Saakashvili, he's probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute. *** From: "Anthony Fenton" http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3614.shtml Soros' double-dealing in the Caucasus oil market By Wayne Madsen WMR: Aug 13, 2008, 00:18 (WMR) -- WMR has learned details of so-called "progressive" cause donor George Soros in the underlying turmoil between Russia and Georgia in the Caucasus. In 1994, Soros set up shop in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to engineer what would become known as the "Rose Revolution," carried out ten years later. Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) jointly pumped tons of money into programs designed to propel Georgia's neocon president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to power in a November 2003 coup that toppled Georgia's President Eduard Shevardnadze, the last Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, from power. The OSI money was mostly spent on training neocon political operatives loyal to Saakashvili and his party and influencing the Georgian media. Media manipulation is a favorite tactic of Soros, one that he has used effectively to curb the power of the American progressive liberal movement. After the Rose Revolution, Soros and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) director Mark Malloch Brown launched the Georgia Development and Reform Fund that was designed to curb corruption in Georgia. However, the fund was actually used to pay increased salaries for employees of the Georgian President's office and the National Police. The $40 million pumped into the fund was matched dollar-for- dollar between OSI and the UNDP. The salaries for Georgia government apparatchiks and police bought loyalty for Saakashvili and Soros in the country. The Tbilisi daily newspaper, 24 Saati ("24 Hours"), discovered the source of the fund was a Cyprus-registered "charity" called "Golden Fleece." The Development and Reform fund was managed by an old Saakashvili crony, former Deputy Justice Minister Konstantine Kublashvili, who served under then-Justice Minister Saakashvili during the Shevardnadze presidency. Kublashvili told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Georgia Service that there was no "dirty money" involved in the Golden Fleece charity. However, WMR has learned that was not what was discovered by the "Georgia shop" at the National Security Agency's (NSA) Medina Regional Security Operations Center (MRSOC) in San Antonio, Texas. A special and highly secure unit at the MRSOC that monitored financial flows to the region discovered the links between Golden Fleece in Cyprus -- Cyprus is a center for Russian-Israeli mob activities -- and Russian-Israeli oligarchs who were trying to oust Russian President Vladimir Putin from power. After leaving the UN, Malloch Brown became vice chairman of Soros' Quantum Fund, Soros' flagship hedge fund, as well as vice president of Soros' OSI. In 2004, Soros, using his "Democracy Alliance," which represented nothing more than a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party by globalist forces represented by Soros and his friends, pooled and bundled campaign contributions for a number of Democratic candidates, earning him the same loyalty that similar bribes bought him in Georgia. Soros reportedly convinced organizations and web sites he funded, including MoveOn.org, DailyKos, Democratic Underground, and others to launch an anti-Halliburton campaign. Halliburton was engaged in the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that pumped oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to the Turkish deep water port at Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast. The campaign by Soros against Halliburton worked. The firm began divesting itself of its Kellogg, Brown & Root subsidiary in early 2006. As the result of the Soros effort against Halliburton, the company's stock plummeted from $40 a share to $26 a share. Soros, a longtime hedge fund and currency speculator who profits from crises and financial collapses, bought 2 million shares of Halliburton at its low share price of $26 per share. He then, according to WMR's financial industry sources, ordered his "progressive" recipients of funding to ease off on their criticism of Halliburton. The result was that Halliburton shares increased to $50 a share. Soros earned a cool $40 million from his manipulation of the politics and finances surrounding Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm. Soros' manipulation of the progressive media is highlighted in an article by Michael Barker, a doctoral student at Griffith University in Australia, titled "The Soros Media 'Empire.'" Soros' role in "democracy manipulation" is cited in the article: "The Soros Foundations' most recent annual report shows that Soros still remains a force to be reckoned with among democracy manipulators, as the entire Soros Foundations Network distributed over $400 million worth of grants in 2006." Saakashvili's own ties with "progressive journalists" linked to Soros are highlighted by his friendship with Scott Horton, a journalist with Harper's. Horton hired Saakashvili in 1994 to work for him at the New York law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler after the Georgian graduated from Columbia Law School. Other Patterson, Belknap et al. alumni include former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and current Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Saakashvili referred to Horton as his "colleague" at a July 2006 seminar at the neocon citadel, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. In January of this year, Saakashvili won the presidential election amid opposition charges of fraud. Opposition Labor Party officials charged that Saakashvili supporters voted more than once at multiple polling places. The verdict from Florida Democratic Representative Alcee Hastings, an impeached former federal judge, was that he saw no evidence of election fraud. Hastings was heading an election observer delegation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation on Europe (OSCE), an organization that his been co-opted by Soros. In 2006, when Saakashvili's police arrested opposition leaders, Konstantin Zatulin, an exiled former Georgian security chief and leader of the opposition Justice Party, told Moscow's Ekho Moskvy radio station that one of those arrested in Georgia was the head of the "Anti-Soros Movement." Russia is taking intense heat from not only the neocon media in its reprisal against Georgian aggression against South Ossetia, but also from the usual Soros-funded "progressive" media outlets, print, broadcast, and web-based. WMR has taken quite a beating over the years from parties funded by Soros. However, we are working on a major initiative that will throw a significant monkey wrench into the manipulation of the media by Soros and his partners-in-crime. Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report. Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report. Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal Email Online Journal Editor _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
