Rebuild Georgian Armed Forces? for What?
September 3, 2008
Georgia Eager to Rebuild Its Defeated Armed Forces
By C. J. CHIVERS and THOM SHANKER
TBILISI, Georgia — Just weeks after Georgia’s military collapsed in panic in the face of the Russian Army, its leaders hope to rebuild and train its armed forces as if another war with Russia is almost inevitable.
Georgia is already drawing up lists of options, including restoring the military to its prewar strength or making it a much larger force with more modern equipment, like air-defense systems, modern antiarmor rockets and night-vision devices.
Officials at the Pentagon, State Department and White House confirmed that the Bush administration was examining what would be required to rebuild Georgia’s military, but stressed that no decisions had been made. The choices each pose difficult foreign policy questions.
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Actually, that's nonsense. The choices pose no difficulties, because the choices are the most blatant and thoughtless idiocy. The decision by Georgia's president, egged on by the Bush administration, showcases the hubris of both presidents, as well as their reaction to stung pride.
America is still paying the price of GB's injured pride and Mikheil Saakashvili has had a taste of what follows, when isolated nations get carried away with neocon rhetoric. Africa, South America, the Middle East and Asia are littered with failed nations that we failed to stand by.
I live in the Czech Republic, a nation that has been invaded throughout its entire fourteen-century history and has survived by acquiescing. Cowardly, you say. Yet a drive through the once-Sudeten countryside shows pill boxes neatly arranged to fight Hitler, now grown over with vines. The Czechoslovak army was prepared. Papers since made public show that Hitler would have been successfully repelled at that stage of the war, had the allies backed Czechoslovakia.
They didn't, as we know all too well from Munich and the army stood down rather than see their nation laid waste. Poland fought and was destroyed, Czechoslovakia submitted and survived. I ask you to judge who decided in their best interests. War is hell, but America has not seen war since 1865. We have fought, but we have not seen the enemy in and over our cities, have not trudged out of town ahead of an advancing and vicious army.
The Russians made short work of Saakashvil's Georgian forces. U.S. military advisors, ignorantly sent to an indefensible country by an ignorant president, are no match for the likes of the Russian army. It's like Tibet standing militarily against China.
Some things are just not meant to be, no matter the egos at hand.
“Our mission is to protect our country from Russian aggression,” Davit Kezerashvili, Georgia’s 29-year-old defense minister, said in an interview last week when asked what missions the military would be organized to perform. “Large-scale Russian aggression. The largest aggression since the middle of the 20th century.”
A 29-year-old can perhaps be forgiven having missed the more recent (and larger) Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that Georgia was “a very important country to us” and that the United States intended to continue the military-to-military relationship.
Georgia is of absolutely no strategic importance to the U.S. and to blather away otherwise is to sell yet another nation down the river of American belligerence. Georgian pipelines may be negotiated, but they will never be defended.
(Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney, one of Moscow's harshest critics, will go to Georgia and other former Soviet states this week to reinforce U.S. support for allies in Russia's backyard.
The Prince of Darkness, Dick Cheney, brings his swagger but when push comes to shove he is far more bush-league than Churchillian. These mercenary visits from a disproved and criminal administration have abandoned diplomacy to choose war. Three things have come from that; 1) military defeat after defeat at the hands of ragged insurgents, 2) an America ever more frustrated and dangerously belligerent, and 3) a Democratic party extorted and co-opted into uselessness by their fear of showing weakness. Those are the very same ingredients that caused a minor assassination of a meaningless Austro-Hungarian Archduke at Sarajevo in 1914 to burst into the conflagration that became the First World War. That was the war that none of the combatants wanted, but were unable to avoid. As we close in on the hundredth anniversary of that needless stupidity, we have learned not one damned thing. Yet the news headlines today are of a vice presidential candidate's unmarried and pregnant 17 year-old daughter. Will the real issues for God's sake reveal themselves in the nation's press and TV before we go to the polls in ignorance? Will the real leadership in this country for God's sake stand up, before we are sucked into endless arms races and moral, as well as economic poverty?