May 06, 2009
Over at LRC, Daniel McAdams has a fantastic blog on the strange goings-on in Georgia, and it deserves to be quoted in full:
?It’s hard not to laugh at the rotted corpse of NATO, so desperate to curry favor with Obama’s continuation of Bush’s ?encircle Russia? strategy, going ahead with planned exercises in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia despite the rather significant fact that the Georgian military is at least partly in open revolt against its own president.
Once a symbol of the West’s stable democratic front against Soviet communism, NATO has descended into an organization that can only cough up some 100 troops for Afghanistan after invoking Article 5 and that is now holding military exercises in an aspirant country that is literally falling apart under the weight of its leadership’s brutality and corruption.
It is a fitting symbol of NATO’s utter uselessness that it is seriously considering countries like Georgia—run by brutal madmen who dash into suicidal wars for absurd reasons—as potential members. Even NATO supplicants like defeated Serbia have had trouble suppressing the giggles, announcing along with Switzerland and Moldova (so far) that they cannot participate in such a joke.
The ongoing farce in Georgia can still provide some laughs, however, such as this howler of President Saakashvilli’s brave front against the evil “Russian-backed” coup attempt. That expression is almost as priceless as the famous tie-eating clip when Saakashvili’s attack on South Ossetia was answered by the Russians.
The fiercely intelligent and always bitingly witty Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, captures perfectly the hilarity of NATO’s Georgian misadventure:
?It would be more logical to hold military drills in a mad-house. Georgia’s military cannot properly receive their colleagues because they are rioting against their own president.?
I would be lying if I did not admit to a bit of schadenfreude, seeing the Beltway libertarians’ once-thrusting Great Rose Revolution Project sink into total collapse brought on by the moral impoverishment of its leadership. And all those sweet young things piling into breathless seminars given by Washington’s ?libertarian? cognoscenti…
Oh, and it should be mentioned that the NATO exercise in Georgia is scheduled to start tomorrow (Wednesday.)?
The moment I read about this incident in my morning paper, I dashed off to The Corner and Contentions to see just what kind of contortions VDH, Max Boot, & Co. would be getting themselves into in order to support our great democratic leader in the Caucuses. But I came up with nothing. Do you think that Saakashvili has become so embarrassing that even the neocons are getting tired of defending the Great Tie-Eater?
Perhaps. But then perhaps there?s more to this than meets the eye. I don?t want to get all ?conspiracy theory? on you or anything, buuut?
Saakashvili?s interior minister first claimed that the whole thing was a Russian-backed coup, but then, according to the WJS, he backed off and acknowledged that the mutiny was confined to a military base (and not the capitol), saying that the disobedience was done to disrupt NATO exercises planned for today (which are going forward.) Moscow views these exercises as extremely provocative, as they?re aimed at the strongholds in South Ossetia it secured last August, and it has expelled two NATO diplomats to express its displeasure.
I have no hard evidence for this, granted, but I wonder whether those Georgian officers might have learned that, despite Hillary?s and Biden?s calls for a ?reset? in relations, Washington and NATO are fishing for some kind of conflict with The Bear and the mutineers simply wanted no part in the plot.
With so much talk of World War II ?pulling us out of the Great Depression,? I?ve often sensed that somewhere in the Pentagon, planners are theorizing that a massive military conflict with a traditional enemy might be just the thing to get the economy going again, or least distract the public for a good long while and revive American ?greatness.?
Marc Faber, who?s a Nostradamus on geo-political and economic matters, suggested as much on CNBC not too long back. (Turn to 4:43 of this video to see what he?s talking about).
Says Faber,
?This economic crisis will be very lengthy, and, I think, the way to come out of it will eventually be war, and this war will be very unpleasant.?
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