America: Agent Provocateur For Russia's Attack on Georgia

Recently the United States began training together with military personnel in the Republic of Georgia. A few weeks later a war broke out. How coincidental...? No. We've been taunting Russia for quite some time now. Can those who orchestrate US foreign policy really not see how the actions of the United States provoke the actions of Russia against the Republic of Georgia?

For our safety, the motto of the next U.S. presidential administration should be "It's the foreign policy, stupid."

An agent provocateur, as defined by dictionary.com is

a secret agent hired to incite suspected persons to some illegal action, outbreak, etc., that will make them liable to punishment.

A lot of America's incitement of Russia to illegal action is not so secret, but it is incitement just the same. Encouraging the nation of Georgia to become a member of NATO is a pretty big slap in Russia's face, although that's just one way we've incited them. Installing missile batteries in former Warsaw Pact countries is yet another taunt. More recently, joint military

Condoleeza Rice was apparently oblivious to the monumental irony of her recent statement that Russia uses its military to deliver messages too often.

operations with Georgia and other former Soviet Bloc countries raised the ire of the Russians to a higher pitch. Perhaps the worst provocation, however, was the waltzing of the United States into Iraq to oust our erstwhile friend Saddam on the most specious of pretexts.

In 2002, as the war drums were beating ever louder in the United States against Saddam Hussein, Ron Paul predicted that our unconstitutional actions would eventually lead to something like...Russia invading Georgia.



Recently, Condoleeza Rice, apparently oblivious to the monumental irony of her statement, had this to say about Russia's actions in Georgia:

Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21st century.

Imagine that Russia's foreign policy was one of setting up military bases across North and Central America. How would you feel? Paul Craig Roberts gives us a good idea of how we should feel:

It is obvious that American foreign policy, with its goal of ringing Russia with US military bases, is leading directly to nuclear war. Every American needs to realize this fact. The US government's insane hegemonic foreign policy is a direct threat to life on the planet.

US News notes that

America contributed to the war in Georgia in two important ways. First, together with its European allies, Washington established two precedents: use of force without approval of the United Nations Security Council and the division of a sovereign nation without U.N. consent.

TruthDig points

NATO...committed us...to an automatic tripwire war with any state (read, the Soviet Union) that attacked any NATO member-state. The American Constitution [forbids this].

--Ed Firmage

out that John McCain's current senior foreign policy adviser has also been an adviser to the Republic of Georgia. Truthdig reveals and opines that

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back.

In this morning's Deseret News, Ed Firmage reminds us that we could have avoided such problems if we'd simply adhered to the tenets of the United States Constitution:

As we observe the fighting in Georgia...we might remember just what NATO was all about. It committed us...to an automatic tripwire war with any state (read, the Soviet Union) that attacked any NATO member-state. The American Constitution gives the war power to the U.S. Congress. The only exception is an attack on the United States. Then and only then could our president respond, as commander in chief, even before Congress declared war. This automatic delegation of the war power to NATO was why J. Reuben Clark Jr., formerly the U.S. representative to all the arms limitation negotiations between World Wars I and II legal adviser to the Department of State and later in the First Presidency of the LDS Church, was totally opposed to NATO, even as he was a staunch opponent of communism...

Clark was called an isolationist.

He wasn't.

He simply believed that the U.S. Constitution means what it says.

And in case the Bush (or a future) Administration decides that Iran is not as plum a target as we once thought (and that Russia looks like more of a pushover), Firmage warns us that:

War should only be decided upon by the deliberation of the Congress of the United States. By no stretch of the imagination should a border dispute between a former state within the former Soviet Union and Russia be considered as if it were an attack on the United States. The Constitution forbids such foolishness.

A few days ago, MSNBC reported:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney told Georgia's pro-American president that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered, and that its continuation would have serious consequences for its relations with the United States," Cheney's office reported Sunday. Asked to explain Cheney's phrase "must not go unanswered," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "It means it must not stand."

Such a statement unavoidably compels us to wonder whether Russia (and other nations) have ever stated that "[United States] aggression must not go unanswered."

Probably so.