This page contains links and short excepts from 9 great, clear articles on the Georgia/Russia/US of A conflict and the issues involved.
Foreign policy is an open issue among libertarians. Some of us are isolationists. Others are pacifists. Others take a more belligerent line.
I am told that Russia is an aggressive power that must be resisted in the Caucasus before it is able to threaten other places. The newspapers are filled with the usual talk of Munich and appeasement, together with claims that a new Cold War is beginning. I deny this.
Russia may be an aggressor in this war. Or it may not be. I will not enter into the details of who moved first, or with what provocation. But, even assuming that Russia is the aggressor, I fail to see what business this war is of the British or American Governments.
For a good reading of Washington’s strategic interests in Georgia (and these do NOT include democracy, self-determination, freedom or peace) you are better off looking at this paper from the Army War College. For wisdom that applies today, we may actually find it in AEI. Jeane Kirkpatrick observed in 1988 that, "Russia is playing chess, while we are playing Monopoly. The only question is whether they will checkmate us before we bankrupt them." Resident AEI scholar Leon Aron, on the panel this week, wrote of Russia under Putin in 2006,
… [the Kremlin decided to]…. reanimate the role of the state, occupy "commanding heights" in economy again, repossess the "jewels" in the "economy's crown," and put the executive branch of the government above all the other branches, permanently.
Kirkpatrick and Aron, as with every topsy-turvy articulation from the AEI, have it exactly right – except for orientation. American interest in Georgia in the past decade is the result of neoconservative fear that Russia will bankrupt America’s heavily indebted and credit-dependent government. And rather than contemporary Russia becoming less free, more economically centralized and tyrannical, Aron’s projection more accurately reflects the United States today, an ugly America that AEI promotes and nurtures.
Posted by Lew Rockwell at August 15, 2008 11:34 AM
The Georgian opposition correctly blames him for starting a war that has been disastrous for Georgia (as well as its victim, South Ossetia), and wants new elections. Mikheil, I am sure there is plush sinecure awaiting you at the American Enterprise Institute.
George Bush, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, has established a welfare system with the warfare State. Through the (evolving) public justifications for his use of American military power, Bush has laid out principles under which foreign countries are entitled to US combat forces.
As he displayed beautifully on the Glenn Beck show, Georgian President Saakashvili is a welfare king who knows how to game the system.
After telling Beck that the Russians were not attacking Georgia, but America – going so far as to write anti-American proclamations on their missiles
Conservatives have long realized that the welfare state is immoral and wastes money, but it also hurts the very people it is supposed to help. I hope they soon realize that the same is true of the warfare state. Trying to spread freedom and peace at missile tip will, in the end, only lead to more repression and war.
Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.
Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.
Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain, and America's lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli.
Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?
Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?
Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin's birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia's Black Sea fleet.
When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia?
Although the unfolding drama in the Caucasus has been a tragedy for its innocent victims, the response by America’s political and media elites has been an entertaining and delusional farce.
Although I am not a fan of Vladimir Putin (he is certainly not a libertarian), it’s hard to garner much sympathy for the Georgians. The Russian counteroffensive merely gave the Georgians a stiff dose of precisely the same medicine they were planning to give to the Ossetians.
All in all, it was a humanitarian tragedy, but hardly a heartrending tale of Georgian victimhood.
But America long ago ceased to analyze events with anything remotely resembling an objective moral standard. Nowadays, the only yardsticks our imperial elites understand are power and self-interest.
What interests does the United States have at stake in the war between Russia and Georgia? Only one: that we remain out of it.
It almost passes belief to think that the Bush administration, bogged down in two wars and planning a third (with Iran), might move toward a confrontation with Russia. Yet that is what the White House appears to be doing. The August 11 Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that
President Bush called the violence unacceptable and Vice President Dick Cheney…said Russia’s actions in Georgia "must not go unanswered"…
Asked to explain Cheney’s comment, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "It means it must not stand."
That phrase should send cold chills down the back of every American.
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 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.
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.
"It is well that war is so terrible," Gen. Robert E. Lee said, "or else we might grow too fond of it." "War is hell," Gen. William T. Sherman said to a graduating class of a military school.
Why hide from Americans what they wanted? The polls say 70 percent or more support war. Well, you should be willing to look at what you support – all of it, not just a censored, prettified version of it.