| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Cowboy | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 5:13 am Post subject: |
| 
The islamoleft prefers that Russia be given free reign to overrun eastern Europe for oil. | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 5:16 am Post subject: |
| What Make Putin Tick ? PETROLEUM !
War and Peace: Petroleum gives Putin the power to wage the former and set terms for the latter.
By Clifford D. May
Scripps Howard News Service
August 21, 2008
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=701719&attrib_id=7374
Perhaps money can’t buy love, but it can certainly purchase power. So as oil prices have been rising, the major oil-producing nations have been gaining clout.
Petroleum is no ordinary source of wealth. It is - or has become - a strategic resource: People in the West can no longer do without it. A sudden restriction in the supply would produce wrenching changes in our way of life. Lacking fuel, our military would cease to function. In the midst of a global conflict against militant Islamist regimes and movements, that’s a problem.
Russia holds the world’s largest natural-gas reserves and the eighth-largest oil reserves — energy on which Western Europe has come to depend. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin appears to have thought long and hard about how to exploit these facts.
In the wake of Russia’s aggression against neighboring Georgia, Garry Kasparov — one of the few Russian opposition leaders not yet eliminated, incarcerated, or intimidated — asks: “Can such a belligerent state be trusted as the guarantor of Europe’s energy supply?” The question answers itself, but Europe’s politicians and bureaucrats are taking no steps that could lead toward energy security.
Meanwhile, it is clear that extending and solidifying Russia’s grip over Europe’s energy supplies is among Putin’s goals. Russian domination of Georgia will mean control over the pipeline running from Baku in Azerbaijan, to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. That will give Russia, along with Islamist Iran, a virtual monopoly over the substantial supply of oil and gas originating in the Caspian Sea region.
President Bush and other Western leaders have been calling Russia’s assault on Georgia a mistake. Putin, who made his bones in the KGB, no doubt sees it as a calculated risk. What’s the worst that can happen to him?
The UN will do nothing because the UN is now manipulated, routinely, by its most unsavory members. NATO is not, at present, a serious military alliance, as its failure in Afghanistan — where it was supposed to take the lead — demonstrates. (Al-Qaeda and its local proxy, the Taliban, will be beaten in Afghanistan only if the U.S. military figures out how to do the job, as the U.S. military figured out — learning from mistakes — how to fight al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.)
And there is no chance that any U.S. leader will “go it alone” militarily in the Caucusus when so many Americans could not find the Caucusus on a map.
So what cards do the U.S. and its allies have to play? Short term, there is diplomatic hardball which would include threatening Russia with expulsion from the G8 (which was meant to be a club for industrialized democracies only), depriving Russia of any chance to host the next Olympics, and blackballing Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.
Longer term, addressing the West’s strategic vulnerability is imperative. Former CIA director Jim Woolsey points out that salt was, for centuries, a strategic resource. It was necessary for the preservation of food. Without it, soldiers could not travel and villagers risked starvation. Wars were fought over salt. As recently as the Civil War, Union and Confederate troops battled over saltworks in the South.
But technology — the advent of refrigeration — turned salt from a strategic resource into just another condiment. Similarly, technology can free the U.S. and the West from the tyranny of dependence on hostile regimes. We can innovate our way out of this crisis.
We don’t need a new Manhattan Project — we just need to open the energy marketplace, to spur more vibrant competition. Lawmakers can accomplish that by leveling the playing field between oil and alternative fuels, and by encouraging the development of technologies that will squeeze energy more efficiently and cleanly from coal (which the U.S. has in abundance) and from crops grown for this purpose. (And no, that doesn’t create hunger — not when American and European farmers are being paid to keep millions of acres of cropland fallow.)
It will help, too, to accelerate research on and development of cars that can run long distances on electricity — which can be derived from nuclear power facilities, wind farms, solar energy collectors, and many other sources.
Or we can sit back and watch as oil flows to us, while wealth and power flow to the despots ruling Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. We’ll burn the oil, they’ll amass the power. Our grandchildren will wonder why we were so feckless in the face of such a dire threat to our security and independence. But by then it may be too dangerous to ask such questions aloud. | | | | Alpha | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 5:32 am Post subject: |
| http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2008/08/msm-russias-rape-of-georgia-is-georgians-own-fault/
“Amid promise of peace, Georgians live in terror”
So reads the headlines of The Guardian. And from the same source:
Several Russian trucks overshot and missed their turning. One broke down. A soldier got the wheezing vehicle going again. Where was he from? “Chechnya. We’ve come here to help,” he said.For the terrified residents of Gori and surrounding villages, it didn’t seem like help. Yesterday morning, as the Russian tanks advanced from their base in South Ossetia they passed through Georgian controlled-villages, telling residents to hang out white flags or be shot.Behind them, according to people fleeing those villages, came a militia army of Chechen and Ossetian volunteers who had joined up with the regular Russian army. The volunteers embarked on an orgy of looting, burning, murdering and rape, witnesses claimed, adding that the irregulars had carried off young girls and men.
There are accounts slowly coming out of Georgia about the behavior of Russian soldiers in Georgia. Unlike the criticism leveled at American troops, the Russians–like Muslims, Chinese and other groups favored by the left–do not get much press, either here or at home. No marches on the Russian Embassy, no Europeans going to the streets. Nothing–except allusions by the left–or Obama–that Bush is at fault.
It is now time to collect some of the outrageous tales coming out of this seemingly-civilized section of the world; to review Putin’s troops and expose their Rules Of Engagement. Maybe it is time for a refresher on why our parents and grandparents hated Russia, why so many immigrated to America.
Mari’s Tale
Monday, August 18, 2008
21 year old girl raped by “soldiers” (eye-witness reports)
Elene Gelashvili, 21 years old, is a refugee from the village of Nikozi:
“When the fighting started in Cxinvali, we all took shelter in the cellars of our houses…our house wasn’t hit by a bomb, but there were dead and wounded all over the place. We couldn’t stay there any longer and decided to walk by foot towards Gori. On the road a driver picked us up and took us to Gori with his minibus.
He told the young girl to cover their heads with a veil and act as if you were elderly people, the Russians and Ossetians are everywhere, they are stopping cars and if they like some girl, they take her right away. “Act, as if you were old women!” My friend Mari said, “What a nonsense, how should they take us away”; we implored her, but she was such a hard-head….
We hadn’t even passed a kilometre, when we were stopped by 30 armed Russians. A skinny guy put is head into the minibus, saw Mari and pulled her out of the car. All in all there were three men in the bus, which they started to beat with their guns. Then they told the driver to drive on, I still have Maris pale face on my mind….
Two days later we were still in Gori but planned to go to Tbilisi, when we heard of a girl, that had been tortured by soldiers; I couldn’t breathe anymore…….I said to myself “if that would really be Mari, she´d be alive at least. I asked some soldiers for her and when I finally found her I hardly recognised her….she had blood all over and was in a terrible state. They had taken her to a village near Cxinvali and about 50 men had raped her there. Then they had put her on drugs and mutilated her. She begged them to kill her…”
Aliko’s Tale
It´s hard for me to speak about those things, but I have to, cause all have to know how inhuman and sadistic these Russians are. Take them to court, I beg you…..
My wife has died when she gave birth to our twins, I raised our twins alone, after that also my grandchildren. When this horrible war started Ani was 17, Levan 15. Levan was torn into pieces in front of my eyes by a bomb, his body has been separated from the legs. Ani was taken to a house by soldiers, those murderers, I could hear hear wailing and moaning, but coudn´t do anything about it; I was lying on the ground, after they had beaten me up….
And those pigs still weren’t satisfied with raping her, they told her: “Run, if you make it away from here within 10 seconds, you´ll be free. The deafened and weeping child ran away and was shot by them when they hadn´t even count to three. My dear grandchild.”
Tina’s tale
“Happened incredible thing: Russian barbarians demolished our gorge. They bombed houses; houses with people inside were in flames. We left our homes and escaped, the road was horrifying: bombs were exploding in front of us damaging cars and people. I saw a car packed with people blew up, human intestines were flying in the air. Some women from my village chose other way to leave the gorge, through river and forests. Cars were carrying bodies of young boys. The gorge is full of dead bodies who were not buried and have been left for crows to eat. I saw a woman who bowled up in front of her house, she was split in many many parts. Wounded asked for help, but there was nobody able to help them. I saw how Russians put two men in sacks and shoot them… Elders stayed in gorge. My parents stayed there. My dad has diabetes and can’t walk. I know their life is in danger, they know it too and they are waiting for death.”
Russians robbing a bank
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdPOLRaonzs
GEORGIAN President Micheil Saakashvili is accusing irregulars associated with the Russian army of raping and looting their way across his country.
“This army travels around with irregulars, travels around with marauders, travels around with rapists, travels around with arsonists, robbers and with looters,” Mr Saakashvili said today.”
“Saakashvili said Russian forces have run amok. “Russian tanks are going for villages inhabited by Georgian populations and throwing people out of their houses, putting people into concentration camps that they are setting up in those villages, and separating men and women,” he told CBS News.
“They are taking things like even furniture, toilet seats, killing people, terrorizing people.” | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 6:01 am Post subject: |
| Crisis in the Caucasus. What Were They Smoking in the White House?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis120.html
by Eric Margolis
The Bush administration appears to have pulled off its latest military fiasco in the Caucasus. What was supposed to have been a swift and painless takeover of rebellious South Ossetia by America’s favorite new ally, Georgia, has turned into a disaster that left Georgia battered, Russia enraged, and NATO badly demoralized. Not bad for two days work.
Equally important, Russia’s Vladimir Putin swiftly and decisively checkmated the Bush administration’s clumsy attempt last week to expand US influence into the Caucasus, and made the Americans and their Georgian satraps look like fools.
We are not facing a return to the Cold War – yet. But the current US-Russian crisis over Georgia, a tiny nation of only 4.6 million, and its linkage to a US anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe, is deeply worrying and increasingly dangerous.
On 7 August, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, ordered his US and Israeli-advised and equipped army to invade the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has been struggling for independence from Georgia since 1992. Most of its people were Russian citizens who wanted union with Russian North Ossetia.
If not directly behind Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia, Washington had to have been at least fully aware of Saakashvili’s plans. The Georgian Army was trained and equipped by US and Israeli military advisors stationed with its troops down to battalion level. CIA and Israel’s Mossad operated important intelligence stations in Tbilisi and coordinated plans with the Saakashvili, whose political opponents have long accused him of being very close to CIA and the Pentagon.
Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia was launched while the world was absorbed by the Beijing Olympics, and Prime Minister Putin was in the Chinese capital. The attack was clearly planned to be a lightening strike that would occupy all of South Ossetia and then Abkhazia before Moscow could react, presenting the Kremlin with a fait accompli.
Who in Bush’s or Cheney’s office approved this stupid adventure? Why did the very smart Israelis get sucked into this imbroglio?
Saakashvili’s stealth "coup de main" quickly turned into a disaster. Russia’s 58th Army responded by routing Georgian forces and delivering a humiliating strategic and psychological blow to the Bush administration. Saakashvili fell right into Moscow’s trap.
Georgia and Russia have been feuding since 1992 over two Georgian ethnic enclaves, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose people differ in ethnicity and language from Georgians and who wanted to rejoin Russia.
The young, US-educated Saakashvili became Georgia’s president in 2003 after an uprising, believed organized by CIA and financed by US money, overthrew the former leader, Eduard Shevardnadze. I came to know and respect Shevardnadze in Moscow when he was Mikhail Gorbachev’s principal ally and architect of Soviet reform.
Had the able, clever Shevardnadze still been in power, this misadventure would never have happened.
Saakashvili quickly became the golden boy of US rightwing neoconservatives and their Israeli allies, who held him a model of how to turn former Russian-dominated states into "democratic" US allies. Georgian critics claim Saakashvili kept power by intimidation, bribery, and vote rigging. The youthful Georgian leader, his head swelled by promises of US support and NATO membership, launched a war of words against Moscow.
Amazingly, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a supposed Russian expert, even publicly assured Saakashvili that the US would "fight" for Georgia. Washington’s latest fiasco falls squarely into her lap.
US money, military trainers, advisers, and intelligence agents poured into the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Israeli arms dealers, businessmen and intelligence agents quickly followed, reportedly selling some $200 million or more of military equipment to the Georgian government.
By expanding its influence into Georgia, the Bush administration brazenly flouted agreements with Moscow made by president George H.W. Bush not to expand NATO into the former USSR. President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both violated this pact. Under the feeble Yeltsin regime, bankrupt Russia could do nothing. But under Putin, newly wealthy Russia finally pushed back after a long series of provocations fromWashington.
Russia’s tough deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, sneeringly observed that Georgia had become a "US satellite." He was absolutely right. And Ivanov, a former KGB colleague of Vlad Putin, knows a satellite when he sees one. Georgia provided the US oil and gas pipeline routes from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan that bypassed Russian territory. Russia was furious its Caspian Basin energy export monopoly had been broken, vowing revenge.
Now that the Russians have checkmated the US and client Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia will likely move into Russia’s orbit. The west rightly backed independence of Kosovo from Serbia. The peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who are ethnically and linguistically different from Georgians, should have as much right to secede from Georgia.
Besides thwarting Bush’s clumsy attempt to further advance US influence into Russia’s Caucasian underbelly, Putin delivered a stark warning to Ukraine and the Central Asian states: don’t get too close to Washington. Putin put the US on the strategic defensive and showed that NATO’s new eastern reaches – the Baltic, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Caucasus – are largely indefensible.
It’s a good thing Georgia was not admitted to NATO, as the White House had reportedly promised Saakashvili. Had Georgia been admitted before this crisis, the US and its NATO allies would have been in a state of war with Russia. Disturbingly, Germany’s conservative prime minister, Angelika Merkel, rushed to Tbilisi to assure Saakashvili that her nation still backed NATO membership for Georgia.
Is the west really ready to be dragged into a potential nuclear war for the sake of South Ossetia? Are American and German troops ready to fight in the Caucasus? Georgia is a bridge too far for NATO.
President George Bush, VP Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain all resorted to table pounding and Cold War rhetoric against Russia. McCain, whose senior foreign policy advisor is a neoconservative and was a registered lobbyist for Georgia, demanded that the US and NATO "punish" Russia and put it into diplomatic isolation.
Unfortunately, the indignant John McCain’s could not even properly pronounce "Abkhazia."
America’s neocon amen chorus demanded a confrontation with Russia, chanting their usual mantras about Munich, appeasement and the myths of World War II. One certainly wondered if the Caucasian fracas was not staged by the Republicans to provide Sen. McCain with the "three a.m. phone call" he has been longing for and a chance to sound tough. This he did, even though his rhetoric was empty and his solutions vapid. Barack Obama ducked the issue or issued a few tepid bromides about halting "Russian aggression."
Meanwhile, hypocrisy flew thicker than shellfire. Bush, who ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and is threatening war against Iran, accused Russia of "bullying" and "aggression." Putin, who crushed the life out of Chechnya’s independence movement, piously claimed his army was saving Ossetians from Georgian ethnic cleansing and protecting their quest for independence.
Bush and McCain demand Russia be punished and isolated. The humiliated Bush is sending some US troops to Georgia to deliver "humanitarian" aid. Equally worrisome, the US rushed to sign a pact with Warsaw to station anti-missile missiles and anti-aircraft batteries, manned by US troops, in Poland. This response is dangerous, highly provocative, and immature. The next president will have to deal with the Bush administrations reckless and foolish acts in the Mideast, Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and now, the Caucasus
The west must accept Russia has vital national interests in the Caucasus and the former USSR. Russia is a great power and must be afforded respect. The days of treating Russia like a banana republic are over. Have we learned nothing from World War I or II, both of which began with flare-ups in obscure Sarajevo and the Danzig Corridor?
The US’s most important foreign policy concern is keeping correct relations with Russia, which has thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at North America. Georgia is a petty sideshow. US missiles in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic are a dangerous, unnecessary provocation that is sowing dragon’s teeth for future confrontation.
August 19, 2008
Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Neocons put US at Risk of Nuclear War with Russia (click on the pic at the following URL):
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/08/neocons-put-us-at-risk-of-nuclear-war.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Margolis also wrote the following article about the USS Liberty attack/cover-up:
THE USS LIBERTY:' AMERICA'S MOST SHAMEFUL SECRET
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2001/04/the_uss_liberty.php | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 6:06 am Post subject: |
| War and Peace: Petroleum gives Putin the power to wage the former and set terms for the latter.
By Clifford D. May
Scripps Howard News Service
August 21, 2008
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=701719&attrib_id=7374
Perhaps money can’t buy love, but it can certainly purchase power. So as oil prices have been rising, the major oil-producing nations have been gaining clout.
Petroleum is no ordinary source of wealth. It is - or has become - a strategic resource: People in the West can no longer do without it. A sudden restriction in the supply would produce wrenching changes in our way of life. Lacking fuel, our military would cease to function. In the midst of a global conflict against militant Islamist regimes and movements, that’s a problem.
Russia holds the world’s largest natural-gas reserves and the eighth-largest oil reserves — energy on which Western Europe has come to depend. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin appears to have thought long and hard about how to exploit these facts.
In the wake of Russia’s aggression against neighboring Georgia, Garry Kasparov — one of the few Russian opposition leaders not yet eliminated, incarcerated, or intimidated — asks: “Can such a belligerent state be trusted as the guarantor of Europe’s energy supply?” The question answers itself, but Europe’s politicians and bureaucrats are taking no steps that could lead toward energy security.
Meanwhile, it is clear that extending and solidifying Russia’s grip over Europe’s energy supplies is among Putin’s goals. Russian domination of Georgia will mean control over the pipeline running from Baku in Azerbaijan, to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. That will give Russia, along with Islamist Iran, a virtual monopoly over the substantial supply of oil and gas originating in the Caspian Sea region.
President Bush and other Western leaders have been calling Russia’s assault on Georgia a mistake. Putin, who made his bones in the KGB, no doubt sees it as a calculated risk. What’s the worst that can happen to him?
The UN will do nothing because the UN is now manipulated, routinely, by its most unsavory members. NATO is not, at present, a serious military alliance, as its failure in Afghanistan — where it was supposed to take the lead — demonstrates. (Al-Qaeda and its local proxy, the Taliban, will be beaten in Afghanistan only if the U.S. military figures out how to do the job, as the U.S. military figured out — learning from mistakes — how to fight al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.)
And there is no chance that any U.S. leader will “go it alone” militarily in the Caucusus when so many Americans could not find the Caucusus on a map.
So what cards do the U.S. and its allies have to play? Short term, there is diplomatic hardball which would include threatening Russia with expulsion from the G8 (which was meant to be a club for industrialized democracies only), depriving Russia of any chance to host the next Olympics, and blackballing Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.
Longer term, addressing the West’s strategic vulnerability is imperative. Former CIA director Jim Woolsey points out that salt was, for centuries, a strategic resource. It was necessary for the preservation of food. Without it, soldiers could not travel and villagers risked starvation. Wars were fought over salt. As recently as the Civil War, Union and Confederate troops battled over saltworks in the South.
But technology — the advent of refrigeration — turned salt from a strategic resource into just another condiment. Similarly, technology can free the U.S. and the West from the tyranny of dependence on hostile regimes. We can innovate our way out of this crisis.
We don’t need a new Manhattan Project — we just need to open the energy marketplace, to spur more vibrant competition. Lawmakers can accomplish that by leveling the playing field between oil and alternative fuels, and by encouraging the development of technologies that will squeeze energy more efficiently and cleanly from coal (which the U.S. has in abundance) and from crops grown for this purpose. (And no, that doesn’t create hunger — not when American and European farmers are being paid to keep millions of acres of cropland fallow.)
It will help, too, to accelerate research on and development of cars that can run long distances on electricity — which can be derived from nuclear power facilities, wind farms, solar energy collectors, and many other sources.
Or we can sit back and watch as oil flows to us, while wealth and power flow to the despots ruling Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. We’ll burn the oil, they’ll amass the power. Our grandchildren will wonder why we were so feckless in the face of such a dire threat to our security and independence. But by then it may be too dangerous to ask such questions aloud. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 6:08 am Post subject: |
| | Clifford May is a neocon Jew.. Another nice try moron... | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 6:09 am Post subject: |
|
Alpha runs from the article's facts crying, "Jooooo, Jooooo, ...."
| | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
