There is an old tradition among kids: you’re the teacher’s pet and you want to get even with someone, say a bigger classmate, for something or other. You can’t take him on directly. So what you do is wait till you see the teacher coming, and just before he sees you, you hit the character you want to get even with. And when, quite naturally, he retaliates, you fall on the ground, screaming and doing your best to show that you’re dying.
Sounds familiar?
I guess I’m not the only one to be amazed and more than a little shocked by the media condemnation and slanted reporting of the Georgia-Russia war. All right, I know the media are scum, but when the BBC joins CNN in declaring Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s dictator, as some kind of latter-day democratic messiah, it’s obvious someone is telling some mighty big whoppers.
Let’s get to the point: Georgia picked, provoked, and began this fight. Georgia attacked South Ossetia, bombed Russian peacekeepers and Russian citizens, and converted the capital of South Ossetia into a sea of ruins. Georgia tried to do all this while the Olympic opening ceremony was on, in the apparent belief that it could get away with it while the world’s attention was diverted. Georgia miscalculated very, very badly and has now come a humongous cropper.
But Georgia is a prospective NATO member, a slavishly pro-Bush vassal led by a man who was a lawyer in the US and is more American than Georgian, and the “enemy” in this case is Russia, which is the enemy because it is no longer the supine and spineless entity it was under Yeltsin.
So we know who the teacher is, and who the teacher’s pet is.
And do we need to talk about the kicking and screaming? Georgia claimed Russia was bombing its capital’s airfield and barracks (which I would personally love to see done) – all signs of Russian aggression – and yet welcomed the French foreign minister in that airport with no sign of bomb damage. Where were the bombs, then? What bombs could these be? From the Special Effects laboratories of Hollywood?
When NATO accuses Russia of using “disproportionate force”, I might wonder, you know, why they used such masses of men and machinery to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. I might even wonder why it’s not “disproportionate force” for the so-called State of “Israel” (incidentally a major backer of Georgia) when it shells and bombs and bulldozes entire Palestinian villages and towns because a crude rocket lands somewhere, quite harmlessly, or when a kid throws a stone at a Zionist occupier.
Now let me say what I think Russia should do, regardless of what Russian President Medvedev actually does: Russia should annex all the liberated enclaves of Georgia, reduce the rest of the place to a charred cinder, and not stop until Mikheil Saakashvili’s head is displayed on a spike outside the ruins of his presidential palace.
Why?
Because Russia needs to make an example of Georgia. Georgia is hardly unique: it’s one of a string of US controlled puppet regimes that are being used in order to “box in” Russia and China, the only two world powers capable of stopping American military hegemony.
This then is why Georgia must be wiped off the face of the earth: first, to provide an example to the other vassals of what they can expect, and, secondly, to demonstrate to potential vassals like India the utter impotence of American military and diplomatic efforts against a nation that stands firm.
In 1939, the then USSR fought and won a decisive battle over invading Japanese troops at Khalkhin Gol in Manchuria. So decisive was this victory and so devastating to the Japanese that even when the USSR was at its weakest in 1941-2, the Japanese never even tried to launch a military strike against them. Accordingly, the Soviets could concentrate their forces against the Germans and defeat them first.
If the Russians now crush Georgia decisively, they could well be creating a new Khalkhin Ghol and eliminate a lot of future conflicts. Remember, they’re the injured party in this war, whatever the US media may say (the same media that talked of WMDs and so on…)
