For 12 days in March, NATO conducted joint military exercises with Georgia at the Krtsanisi National Training Center near the capital city of Tblisi. Three hundred and fifty personnel from twenty-four NATO countries participated. “We are not accepting that Russia or any other power
can decide what members can do ,” says NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, a former Prime Minister of Norway. ” He reiterates that the 29 member states have “clearly stated that Georgia will become a member of NATO.”
Although the western mainstream media did its best to flip the story-line, Georgia aggressively started a 5-day war with Russia in August 2008, indiscriminately shelling South Ossetian civilians and Russian peacekeepers. The U.S. had provided 277 million dollars in military aid to Georgia from 1997 until 2008, increasing its military budget thirty-fold in the few years prior to the conflict. Perhaps, Tbilisi sought to foolishly try out some of its new equipment, or, more likely, the Bush administration gave a green light for the barbaric provocation. After all, in 2004, the U.S. stated that its military presence in Georgia was permanent. In its usual militarist cheerleader role, the western mainstream media, above all the US press, did its best to spread a fable that Russia suddenly decided to attack Georgia. Nevertheless, three months after the end of the conflict and amidst the post Obama election hysteria, the New York Times decided to print some foreign policy news that contradicted Washington’s talking points: a front page article describing Georgian aggression under the Presidency of Mikhail Saakashvili.
Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.
Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.
…[A}ccording to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack…
The monitors were members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E. A multilateral organization with 56 member states, the group has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s.
Chivers, CJ & Barry, E 2008, ‘Accounts undercut claims by Georgia on Russia war’, New York Times, 7 Nov, p. A1.
Subsequent to his illegitimate actions against South Ossetia and Russia, which killed 59 Russian Peacekeepers and thousands of civilians, Saakashvili, wanted on criminal charges, fled Georgia. He tried his hand at Governor of Ukraine’s Odessa Oblast before his deportation to Poland. In January 2018, a Georgian court sentenced Saakashvili in absentia to three years in prison for covering up evidence in the killing of a banker; in June, the court handed down a six year sentence for the abuse of power.
He recently voiced his plans to return to Ukraine if his preferred presidential candidate prevails; however, if European governments did indeed value international law and norms, Saakashvili’s next destination should be the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands and not Kiev. That doesn’t appear likely.
Nearly thirty years ago, in February of 1990, the United States gave the Soviet Union its “ironclad guarantee” that if German unification proceeded, NATO would not move “one inch eastward.” One can easily imagine what a Native American would have thought had one been within earshot of those hollow words. You can almost hear the faint echoes of Native Ancestors whispering, “They are not to be trusted. Look what they did to our people.” NATO, steered by the U.S. military-industrial complex and European elite’s preference for expansion, slithered to the Russian border, planting their flag in Estonia and Latvia, as well as in Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, and, most recently, in North Macedonia. So much for an “ironclad guarantee.”
In 1999, despite the existence of a diplomatic solution, the U.S. and NATO disregarded the Russian veto and the U.N. Charter, illegally and illegitimately bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 78 days; in 2003, the U.S. disregarded Moscow’s opposition to invading Iraq; in 2011, NATO violated the mandate of U.N. Resolution 1973– a no-fly zone– and punished Libya with seven months of bombing, which resulted in the expansion of ISIS and chaos in that country. Numerous other examples of U.S.-NATO illegitimate acts exist. Yet, NATO consistently labels Russia’s foreign policy as ‘aggressive’, projecting its unacceptable international behavior onto others.
NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine is just another step for western militarists to create more geopolitical tension and keep the military-industrial complex booming, and in the process, the western alliance- a fig leaf for U.S. militarism- makes the international environment more dangerous.