* Â Yeah, it may not be jihad, but we can’t ignore it any longer. The incompetence of this Bush administration is unbearable: when an ally is attacked, we have to help. What are you doing Bush? Anybody home?
Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:08:51 pm PDT
Fox News reporters on the ground in Georgia are now saying that Russian troops are moving in on Tbilisi (Steve Harrigan said Russian forces were at one point within 12 miles of the city), and that Abkhazia is under the control of Russian-backed separatists
Pic ripped from ZIP
Platitudes and bullshit:
Bush: Russia’s Actions Raise ‘Serious Questions’ About Intent
Henry J. Pulizzi reports on the White House.
U.S. President George W. Bush said he is concerned by reports that Russia isn’t living up a provisional cease-fire in Georgia, warning that the Kremlin is putting its relations with the U.S. and Europe at risk.
“We expect Russia to meet its commitment to cease all military activities in Georgia and we expect all Russian forces that have entered Georgia in recent days to withdraw from that country,” Bush said in a statement in the White House Rose Garden Wednesday. “As I have made clear, Russia’s ongoing action raises serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region.”
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Simon Sebag Montefiore:
The troubles in Georgia are not the equivalent of an assassinated archduke in Sarajevo. But historians may well point to this little war, beside the spectacular Olympic launch of resurgent China, as the start of the twilight of America’s sole world hegemony. If the new version of the Great Game – the strategic rivalry and conflict between the British and Russian empires in the 19th century – is for the oil of the Caucasus and Central Asia, the West may be in the process of losing it…
Russia, which appears to be pushing its tanks into Georgia to overthrow its democratically elected president, has demonstrated gleefully the limits of US power and Moscow’s historic destiny as regional hegemon and restored 21st-century superpower. The empire has struck back and shaken the order of the world.
But this is, of course, not just the beginning of the end of American “world hegemony”, such as it was, but a further sign of the decline of the West it defends.
Even so, I’m not sure how decisive a step is the West’s failure to defend Georgia. When did it ever have the power to help, successfully, a territory so close to Russia’s borders? Even when the American “hegemon” was near its zenith, Russia could still crush Hungary and Czechoslovakia without fear of the West taking up arms. The great imperial powers couldn’t even win the Crimean War.
Continue reading Bush blows bubbles while our ally Georgia is being overrun →
[A British national and two French people are among 14 killed in a suicide bomb attack in a popular tourist cafe in Marrakesh, according to reports by French newspaper Le Figaro. ]
