Eat A Peach

Here’s a little Georgian music to start off this rant about stupid people getting people killed for no good reason.

Saakashvili looks in the mirror and associates his self-image with this music, but this music is closer to the truth.

“Uncle Billy” Sherman knew something about war, and he only tried what Saakashvili did once. Joe Johnston showed him the error of his ways and he learned not to announce his target to his opponent. If your opponent knows what you are going to attack they can plan their defense in great detail.

Danger Room looked at one part of that defense in their post, Inside the Battle for the Black Sea. Essentially, at least the transports had to have been on the way to the coast of Georgia before the action started. Further proof of that is that the heavy equipment for the troops that landed arrived by rail, which means they had been loaded onto trains before anything happened and were pre-positioned for transport.

Russia just “happened to be conducting a training exercise” on the other side of the Georgian border, so it had reinforcements with their heavy equipment in South Ossetia in less than a day after the Georgians started to move. The Russians already had troops in South Ossetia: the tripwire force they referred to as “peacekeepers” and the Ossetian paramilitary forces that the Russians had been equipping and training for a long time.

The Russians knew this was going to happen, and knew what Georgia was going to attack.  That is the biggest reason the Georgians shouldn’t have done it – it was a Russian trap.

It’s a has long been known that “truth is the first victim of war”. Faced with a Russian media that is again owned and operated by the “party”, and the American media that has been worthless for years, you have to piece together information from whoever is around. Reporters are being wounded and killed covering the conflict and real reporting is sparse. According to non-governmental organizations [NGOs] that were in South Ossetia when this began, there may have been between 100 and 200 casualties [wounded or dead] during the initial assault, not thousands as the Russians have been claiming. The Russians are still denying access to Russian NGOs like the Red Cross, even though the fighting has been over in South Ossetia for days.

The Russians are using paramilitary troops, generally North Ossetian “reservists”. You can recognize them in the pictures coming out by their covered faces and Russian uniforms with no unit insignia. There is burning and looting going on in Georgia, probably by the paramilitary groups. This has been confirmed by NGOs and foreign reporters on the ground.

As Danger Room reports, Russia Used Cluster Bombs In Georgia. A Dutch journalist was killed, an Israeli wounded, and a Reuters vehicle perforated by cluster weapon, and there are pictures of the casing and unexploded bomblets.

Putin is comparing what Russia is doing to Kosovo. It would have been better for all concerned if Saakashvili hadn’t decided to emulate the Russian Chechnya tactics in South Ossetia, but he was elected as a Georgian nationalist, and this is the kind of incredibly stupid thing nationalists do, whether they are named Milosevic, Putin, or Saakashvili. After religion, nationalism is the most poisonous belief that humans become infected with.