I, too, was unable to access the threads on this site all day Sunday.  I could not get past the discussion board index.

Jim

No government can "legitimately" make war on its own population, be it in Chechnya under Putin, South Ossetia under Saakashvili, or Iraq's Kurdish provinces sunder Saddam.

Concerning "who commited the worst violence", as I said, this is not a pissing contest.
Reports from Tskhinvali differ from the reports you quote.

Yet you solely quote support for the Georgian stance. Why?
Do you want to re-start the Cold War, and sacrifice objectivity for partisanship?

More responses to older posts..

[QUOTE=Jstanl;709743]I confess to being a little irritated in making my response.  There is a distinct underlying message here of Russia gets what Russia wants and the USA is expected to get in line.

I know the feeling from the Iraq wars, #1 and #2.
Helplessness, demons and clowns running rampant and tearing my precious planet apart.
Not nice.

There has been, in the history of my cultural heritage, a similar assumption by the French and the British (read English).  The USA did not get where it is today by allowing the current world bully to intimidate us.  If we had we would never have stood up to the British.  We would not have resisted Germany's attempt to dominate Europe or Japan's attempt to take control of the Western perimeter of the Pacific Ocean during the twentieth century.

This is nice patriotic talk, maybe there is some truth to it.
Yet, you may just have overlooked the moment in which "you" became just another world bully,
and intimidate others. But that is a different story for a different place.

The thing that is bothering me about your position, as I understand it, is that if it is typical of the European opinion of an effort to support the effort of other people to create a democratic society; then men like Putin, Chavez, Mugabe, Castro, Saddam, Osama and the Iranian religious junta may already own the world.

Am I understanding you correctly here, that you say (A) that Saakashvili is interested in creating a democratic society, and that (B) an ethnic Georgian's right to self-determination weighs more than an ethnic Ossetian's or Russian's right?

Both are very misguided attitudes, to say the least.

[QUOTE=L.Ann;694841]
Chark:   i have no issue with citizenship, nor passports......However, it appears that the "Russian government believes they have the obligated responsibility to defend all of their citizens no matter where they may be in the world."  Thus, don't you find the free hand out of massive citizenship was a strategic move from the beginning to overthrow the government and an excuse for invasion of territoral rights in a sovereign country?  I think it is quite obvious to most analysts without vowed political alignments....
[/QUOTE]

I do hope that Jim will return to the debate, he writes so brilliantly and is poised with intellectual, philosophical and scientific ability and consideration.....:)

"A fight for the oil pipelines is one answer-By absorbing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia puts even more pressure on Georgia's BTC pipeline, one of the few that transits oil through the Caucasus that is not under Russian control."

"These three former Soviet republics all have pro-Western and anti-Russian leaders. All three countries signed a preliminary deal last year to extend a Ukrainian pipeline to move Caspian oil from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, and then on to the West - again, outside Russian control."

"Democracy’s basic ingredients, the freedom to assemble, to speak, to choose - these are like kryptonite in the hands of the Kremlin’s authoritarian mega-capitalists."

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/ … 92535.aspx

L.Ann;

Thanks for your support but I'm really not that smart or knowledgeable.  I am just old and have been observing these issues for a long time, probably before you or Char were born.  ;)  One thing about being my age (72) is that one eventually quits thinking in terms of what is possible in one's own lifetime.  That does tend to lead to a more philosophical perspective.  :)

Jim