Russia tells West to 'forget' Georgian rule in enclaves.

So, Bush sends his troops to Georgia to deliver aid, but really he's sending them because he wants the Bill Kristols of the world to know that he's "doing something". However, his defence secretary has quickly made it clear that the US is not going to intervene militarily in Georgia.

Robert Gates, the defence secretary, said he saw no prospect of the US engaging militarily in the Caucasus conflict, but warned that Russia's invasion of Georgia could set back its relations with the west for years.

However, having encroached on Russia's backyard enough to cause the latest outbreak of violence, Bush has now pushed even further.

But the east-west climate, already chilly because of the Georgia conflict, plunged further last night when Washington and Warsaw put aside a year of dispute and agreed to station 10 interceptor rockets at missile silos in Poland as part of the US missile defence shield in the Baltic region.

As part of the deal, the Americans will reportedly supply Poland with Patriot missiles, build a permanent US military base in the country, and provide mutual security guarantees.

The deal will enrage Moscow, which is vehemently opposed to the US facilities in Poland and a radar station in the neighbouring Czech Republic.

While the Americans say the shield is aimed at Iran, the Russians insist it is directed at them. Moscow has pledged to retaliate and has warned of a new arms race.

And they said putting an idiot in charge of the US wouldn't matter as he would be surrounded by good advisers? Bush seems intent on pushing against Russia and, what's worse, is that he doesn't appear to have any kind of plan. He just seems determined not to lose face.

The Russians, however, are making it very clear that what happens from now on in the Caucasus' is none of America's business.

Russia positioned itself yesterday as the unequivocal victor in its brief war with Georgia, with its Foreign Minister stating that the world could "forget about" Georgian control of two separatist enclaves.

Speaking after President George Bush insisted on the respect of Georgian territorial integrity, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, rejected any such talk. President Dmitry Medvedev drove home the message by meeting in the Kremlin with the two separatist leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Despite the presence of American troops, or perhaps because of it, the Russians are lazily making their way out of Georgia destroying Georgian military hardware as they go.

As Russian troops slowly withdrew from deep inside the former Soviet republic, there were reports that they were destroying airfields and military installations as they went, further crippling the Georgian army, which, despite its US training, has been battered and demoralised.

As Georgian troops moved out of Tbilisi back towards Gori, which they had abandoned on Tuesday, the Russian army said it would take at least two days to leave the city, having earlier denied being there at all. Russian troops also destroyed military vessels in Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti. The aim, said analysts, was to prevent Georgia from renewing military hostilities in its breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the medium-term future.

Bush's big gamble regarding Georgia has failed. And he is left handing out soup and sandwiches whilst the Russians make their exit, destroying Georgian military hardware as they leave.

The future of South Ossetia and Abkhazia remains hazy, but from the noises being made by both the US and the Russians, Russia is prepared to fight for them and the US is not.

Georgia, whether encouraged by the US or not, has made it's big push to reclaim control of South Ossetia; the end result appears to be that it has lost both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Bush can send as many soldiers as he wants to hand out sandwiches, but it won't change the facts on the ground. The victor here is Putin.

Related Articles:

Mary Dejevsky: Russia the bad guys? Who are the West trying to kid?

Why was it so difficult for outsiders to believe that Moscow wanted precisely what its leaders said they wanted: a return to the situation that had pertained before Georgia's incursion into South Ossetia – and does it matter that its intentions were so appallingly misread? Yes it does. If outsiders impute to Moscow motives and objectives it does not have, they alienate Russia even further, and make a long-term solution of many international problems that more difficult. It is high time we treated Russia's post-Soviet leaders as responsible adults representing a legitimate national interest, rather than assuming the stereotypical worst.

That's my problem with McCain's stance on this. It's cold war nonsense and it should be considered long out of date.

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Tags: Georgia, South Ossetia, US, Russia, Putin, Bush, Cheney

Bush gave troops false hope.

The level of Bush's duplicity has been laid bare by the fact that he recently said that, if the Democrats did not quickly give him the Iraq war funding that he was asking for, then this would be responsible for troops having to stay longer in Iraq than Bush would desire.

During his Rose Garden remarks, Bush said it would be "irresponsible" for the Democratic leadership in Congress "to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds."

Delay "will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines, and others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to," said the president.

Now, US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has announced that a troops will have their combat tours lengthened from 12 months to 15 months and has described this as "difficult but necessary."

Gates said the longer tours would give the Pentagon the capability -- if required -- to continue the surge in Iraq for "at least a year" until next April. But he said the progress of the war would determine whether that happens, as well as how long the policy of extended tours would last.

Most active-duty Army units have been spending one year at home between 12-month deployments. However, U.S. commanders in Iraq have recently warned their soldiers to plan on tours as long as 18 months.

So, this was always what they were always going to do and Bush sought to move the blame for that on to the Democrats for not giving him the "clean bill" he desired when he must have known all along that, in order to keep his surge going till next April, this was always on the cards.

So he was using fake concern for the troops and giving the dishonest impression that, if the Dems gave him what he was asking for, then longer deployment would not have been necessary.

It is quite clear from what Gates is saying that this longer deployment was always a possibility.

It's not even the fact that he tried to put the blame for this on to the Democrats that I think is so disgusting, it's the fact that he held out the hope to the troops that if the Democrats gave him the clean bill he desired that they would not have their tours extended. He was holding out a hope that he knew to be false as he was saying it.

Why is he allowed to portray himself as the troop's guardian when he would do something that cruel? He never accepts any responsibility for anything, so there's no great shock that he would attempt to make someone else responsible for his actions; but to pretend that this was something that he would only do if forced to do so by others - whilst knowing the opposite to be the case - is simply despicable.

Tags: Bush, Iraq war, combat tour extension, Gates, surge

Target Iran: US able to strike in the spring

And as the Senate discovers how the Bush administration lied and manipulated intelligence in order to justify attacking Iraq, we have the news that the Bush regime are at the advanced stage of preparations for a strike against Iran, with only the timing under question.

Some say they could attack this spring whilst others say they'll leave it to next year so that Bush can attack Iran just before he leaves office. He not only has no plans to clean up the mess he has created in Iraq before he slinks out the door, he's actually thinking about opening up a whole new Middle Eastern nightmare before he slips the keys under the doormat.

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision. The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: "I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."

Cannistrano points out that no actual decision has been taken, but one only has to listen to the hardening of Bush's language towards Iran to realise in what direction his decision is leaning.

Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.

In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.

The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.

"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."

The people cheer leading Bush towards a strike on Iran are the same people who cheer led the case for the war with Iraq. The American Enterprise Institute appeared to be out of favour as Iraq descended into chaos, however, Bush recently took their advice over the advice of James Baker and the Iraq War Study Group when he decided to implement his "surge and accelerate" policy as opposed to Baker's proposal for dialogue with Iran and Syria.

Indeed, Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the American Enterprise Institute is vocal in calling for such a strike:

I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself." But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon "is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force."

Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air."

And then, of course, there is the small matter of Bush's legacy.

Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.

This was always the problem of having a US President with so little interest in foreign affairs. Bush seems not to realise that Iran achieved superpower status the very moment he invaded Iraq. The reason that Reagan, Kissenger and others hoped that Iraq and Iran would fight themselves to stalemate was precisely because if either was victorious then they would have superpower status in the region.

Bush made Iran a regional superpower by removing Iran's enemies in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and he made them a superpower without Iran having to fire a single shot.

It is also highly unlikely that any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities will succeed and any attack will certainly not remove Iran's status as a regional superpower.

Bush has created his own monster, and if he thinks he can put what he has created back into the box by a few air strikes over Tehran then he is even more seriously deluded than I had previously thought.

Iran is a new regional superpower and it is aligned to the Maliki government in Iraq that Bush supports. That is simply the reality that Bush has created. All of these facts are interrelated and interconnected. Bush's spectacular lack of curiosity seems to have blinded him to the fact that you can't pull this particular piece of string without unravelling the whole tapestry.

If Bush thinks things are bad in Iraq now, just wait until he attacks Iran and enrages Iraq's Shia population. At the moment it's mostly Iraq's Sunni's that are lined up against his forces, when he sets Iraq's Shia's against the US it really will be reminiscent of the American exit from Saigon when soldiers scrambled to get on to fleeing helicopters.

Bush, and his neo-con advisers, seem to believe that each of these things exist in isolation and can be dealt with separately. This is a fatal error. But it's an error that Bush is on the brink of making.

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tag: Bush, James A Baker, Iran, Maliki, American Enterprise Institute, air strikes, neo-conservatives, Cheneywar study group, Dick Cheney, nuclear proliferation, Shia, Sunnis, US State Department, Afghanistan, Taliban

Defense Official Resigns Over Detainee Remarks

I've covered this matter before.

A senior Pentagon official responsible for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said he finds it "shocking" that top US attorneys are rushing to defend "terrorists" locked up there.

"The major law firms in the country ... are out there representing detainees," Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said in a Federal News Radio interview Thursday, available online.

"And you know what, it's shocking," he said.

This was the astonishing position held by Cully Stimson, revealing that under the Bush administration, the concept of innocence until proven guilty had been all but abandoned. The very fact that a person had been held in Guantanamo Bay, was for Stimson sufficient proof of guilt that no lawyer should ever consider defending such a person. Indeed, he went further and said that:

"I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms."

So he not only tried to discourage lawyers from defending persons held at Guantanamo Bay, he went further and suggested that lawyers who did so ought to be boycotted by leading firms.

I said at the time:

If the Bush regime have any last remnant of decency, they will fire him. But watch this space, they won't.

However, it would appear that whilst I was correct that they wouldn't fire him, they have at least put sufficient pressure on him to fall on his own sword. From the New York Times:

A senior Pentagon official resigned Friday over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects, the Defense Department said.

Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told him on Friday that he had made his own decision to resign and was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Stimson said he was leaving because of the controversy over a radio interview in which he said he found it shocking that lawyers at many of the nation's top law firms represent detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

''He believed it hampered his ability to be effective in this position,'' Whitman said of the backlash to Stimson's comments.

As his position included responsibility for the men detained at Guantanamo Bay, I should think his comments "hampered his ability to be effective in his position" a great deal.

It's only right that he has gone, although I can't help thinking that Gates has missed a good opportunity to signal that there has been a clean sweep after the Rumsfeld years at the Defence Department. He should have personally fired him and kicked him out of the Pentagon. Then we'd really know that things had changed there.

We can be thankful for small mercies though, at least Stimson did admit that he was leaving because of those inane remarks, rather than expressing some wish to spend more time with his kids.

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tag: Cully Stimson, Guantanamo Bay, Robert Gates,

Bush is creeping towards confrontation with Iran

US rhetoric against Iran took a decidedly chilly turn yesterday when secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, said the US was not attempting to "goad" Iran into conflict but stated:

Mr. Gates said that the United States did not intend to engage in hot pursuit of the operatives into Iran.

“We believe that we can interrupt these networks that are providing support, through actions inside the territory of Iraq, that there is no need to attack targets in Iran itself,” Mr. Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I continue to believe what I told you at the confirmation hearing,” he added, referring to last month’s hearings on his nomination, “that any kind of military action inside Iran itself would be a very last resort.”

"A last resort"? So, for the first time, action inside Iran is spoken of as a real possibility. Even if that possibility is couched in "last resort" terms.

This is now beginning to resemble the farce that was played out before the invasion of Iraq, when Bush went through the motions of pretending that no military decision had been taken and that Saddam could have avoided invasion if he only handed over his WMD.

Tony Snow has decided to play the role of Ari Fleischer:

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, warned reporters away from “an urban legend that’s going around” that Mr. Bush was “trying to prepare the way for war” with Iran or Syria.

You will remember that before the Iraq war Fleischer issued similar statements that nothing had yet been decided and that war was not inevitable; statements that were all later proven to be disingenuous at best and outright lies at worst.

Indeed, when asked whether or not he believed the President had the inherent power to attack Iran without authorisation from Congress, Snow became downright evasive.

MATTHEWS: Tony, will the president ask Congress‘ approval before any attack on Iran?

TONY SNOW, WHITE PRESS SECRETARY: You‘re getting way ahead of yourself, Chris. Nobody here is talking about attacks on Iran. . . .

MATTHEWS: Well, he did say we‘re going to disrupt the attacks on our forces, we will interrupt the flow of support from Iran. Does that mean stopping at the Iranian border or going into Iran?

SNOW: Well, again, I think what the president is talking about is the war in Iraq, Chris.

MATTHEWS: So he will seek congressional approval before any action against Iran?

SNOW: You are talking about something we‘re not even discussing...

MATTHEWS: Well, you are, Tony, because—look at this.

I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.”

Isn‘t that about Iran?

SNOW: It‘s about—yes, it is, in part. And what it is, is it‘s saying, “Look, we are going to make sure that anybody who tries to take aggressive action. But when Bill Clinton sent a carrier task force into the South China Sea after the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan, that was not as a prelude to war against North Korea. You know how it works. . . .

MATTHEWS: My concern is we‘re going to see a ginning-up situation whereby we follow in hot pursuit any efforts by the Iranians to interfere with Iraq. We take a couple shots at them, they react. Then we bomb the hell out of them and hit their nuclear installations without any action by Congress. That‘s the scenario I fear, an extra-constitutional war is what I‘m worried about.

SNOW: Well, you‘ve been watching too, too many old movies featuring your old friend Slim Pickens is what you‘re doing now, come on.

MATTHEWS: No, I‘ve been watching the war in Iraq is what I‘ve been watching. As long as you say to me before we leave tonight that the president has to get approval from Congress before making war on Iran.

SNOW: Let me put it this way. The president understands you‘ve got to have public support for whatever you do. The reason we‘re talking to the American public about the high stakes in Iraq and why it is absolutely vital to succeed is you‘ve got to have public support. And the president certainly, whenever he has taken major actions, he has gone before Congress.

You'll notice that at no point here does Snow actually offer any reassurance that the President needs to go to Congress to obtain permission to widen the war into Iran, he rather refers to the way things have been done in the past, hinting that this may be repeated but offering no guarantee that it will.

We must never forget that, although he is boxed into a terrible corner, Bush's way out has always been to expand conflict rather than to contain it. We witnessed this during the conflict between Israel and Lebanon when Bush was pushing for a wider Middle Eastern war involving both Syria and Iran.

Indeed, the neo-cons have never hidden their belief that this campaign was about reordering the entire Middle East with Iraq merely a starting point for wider regional change.

Bush is now obsessed with his legacy, a legacy that - at this particular moment - is a woeful one. What has he to lose from widening the war and passing the responsibility for clearing up his mess on to his successor?

We must never forget that we are dealing with ideologues here.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn't a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they're on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that's what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Bush was offered the chance for a withdrawal whilst claiming victory by the Baker Report and has rejected it.

He is now making threatening noises against Iran whilst his colleagues refuse to admit that he would need Congressional permission to expand the war, rather like the way Bush stated that he didn't "need a permission slip" to invade Iraq.

Indeed, Joe Biden has stated that the Bush administration that it does not have congressional authority to attack Iran.

"That will generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate, I predict to you," Sen. Joseph Biden, D- Del., told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Thursday.

Biden is saying this because he can also see the writing on the wall.

Insane and self destructive it may be, but Bush is creeping towards confrontation with Iran.

As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently pointed out, the administration seems to be following exactly the same script on Iran that it used on Iraq: "The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops."

We've been here before. Now, the fact that the Iraq war is going disastrously would make any sensible person rule out a US attack on a country that could cause it so much harm to the US and it's interests. However, Israel continues to call for a US attack on Iran and threatens to do so itself if the US does not step up to the plate.

Indeed, intelligence services are reporting that such a plan exists and will be implemented in early 2007.

The first two or three months of 2007 represent a dangerous opening for an escalation of war in the Middle East, as George W. Bush will be tempted to "double-down" his gamble in Iraq by joining with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair to strike at Syria and Iran, intelligence sources say.

President Bush's goal would be to transcend the bloody quagmire bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq by achieving "regime change" in Syria and by destroying nuclear facilities in Iran, two blows intended to weaken Islamic militants in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Both Bush and Blair have nothing left to lose. Both of their legacies are tied up in the quagmire that is Iraq. By expanding the conflict they can claim to be visionaries, seeing dangers that the rest of us are too Chamberlain-like to acknowledge.

It's insanity, but it's better than the legacy they have currently carved for themselves. As Blair put it last night, "to retreat would be a catastrophe".

In other words, "Onward Christian soldiers".

God help us all.

tag: Bush, Iraq war, Blair, War On Terror, Iran, surge and accelerate, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report

Gates: No withdrawal from Iraq whilst Bush is President.

US Defence Secretary nominee Robert Gates, the man widely expected to take over from Donald Rumsfeld, has indicated that he expects the Iraq problem to be passed on to Bush's successor.

Most news outlets are focussing on his comments that the US are not winning in Iraq, but I found this comment far more interesting:

"Our course over the next year or two will determine whether the American and Iraqi people and the next president of the US will face a slowly but steadily improving situation in Iraq or... the very real risk and possible reality of a regional conflagration," he said.

The new Defence Secretary isn't planning on pulling the troops home anytime soon; indeed, he's specifically stating that this problem will pass itself on to the next administration.

So why are the Democrats approving this guy?

Click title for source.

tag: Iraq war, Bush, "Stay the course", Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates