Russia accuses US over Georgia

[Tinoire]

Russia accuses US over Georgia
By Tom Warner
Published: December 8 2003 4:00 | Last Updated: December 8 2003 4:00

Russia accused the US at the weekend of having pressured Georgia's former President Eduard Shevardnadze out of office, partly by helping to organise the demonstrations last month that convinced him to resign.

"There are enough facts bearing witness that the events of those days weren't any kind of spontaneous occurrence," Igor Ivanov, Russia's foreign minister, said on his ministry's internet site.

<snip>

Mr Ivanov said Richard Miles, US ambassador, had helped prepare the protest movement in Georgia, a claim Mr Miles has repeatedly and strongly denied. He also said it was "becoming more obvious" that James Baker and Gen John Shalikashvili, US emissaries who visited before the protests, had tried to persuade Mr Shevardnadze to quit. Tom Warner, Tbilisi

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1069493796360&p=1012571727166

[SpiralHawk]

1. Oh oh - Ze Carlyle Claptrap Syndrome again !

Somewhere in the DU archives is a thread detailing the early autumn journey of Poppy Bush to Russia to meet with Pooty Poot.

Bush left, came home and abruptly resigned from the board of Carlyle. Then things started to get really queer. The Russian billionaire was busted, and other shit like that.

If a good researcher could find that thread and post the link in this thread, it would CONNECT A LOT OF DOTS.

Beseechingly, yr. dialup-doldrums buddy, SpiralH.

[pinto]

18. here's a piece from Greenleft (Au) about billionaire arrest

http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/562p20.htm

[Langis]

2. James Baker...

Why is that name strangely familiar?

[SpiralHawk]

3. Link: new Greg Palast article on Baker

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=300&row=0

BAKER TAKES THE LOAF

President's Business Partner Slices Up Iraq
TomPaine.com
Monday, December 8, 2003

by Greg Palast


Well, ho ho ho! It's an early Christmas for James Baker III.


All year the elves at his law firm, Baker Botts of Texas, have been working day and night to prevent the families of the victims of the September 11 attack from seeking information from Saudi Arabia on the Kingdom's funding of Al Qaeda fronts.


It's tough work, but this week came the payoff when President Bush appointed Baker, the firm's senior partner, to restructure the debts of the nation of Iraq.


And who will net the big bucks under Jim Baker's plan? Answer: his client, Saudi Arabia, which claims $30.7 billion due from Iraq plus $12 billion in reparations from the First Gulf war.

[Langis]

4. Ah ok

"Just last week Baker said, "I fixed the election in Florida for George Bush." That was the substance of his remarks last week to an audience of Russian big wigs as reported to me by my somewhat astonished colleagues at BBC television."

It's that James Baker.

[Say_What]

15. Conflicts-R-Us

Palast is great with words!!

I don't know anything about Russian geography, but why do I get the feeling that the Caspian Sea is near Georgia?

From the article.

Baker's claim to have fixed the election was not a confession; it was a boast. He meant to dazzle current and potential clients about his Big In with the Big Boy in the White House. Baker's firm is already a top player in the Great Game of seizing Caspian Sea oil. (An executive of Exxon-Mobil, one of Baker Botts's clients, has been charged with evading taxes on bribes paid in Kazakhstan.)

[Pale_Rider]

5. The IRI apparently are beating their chests about the success ...

... of the bloodless coup in Georgia.

http://www.thehill.com/open_secrets/120303.aspx

Georgia on McCain’s mind after resignation

Last week’s “white rose revolution” in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia had lots of nuts-and-bolts help from the Republican Party.

The International Republican Institute (IRI), the GOP’s civil-society training branch, headed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has been working in Georgia for eight years.

The aim was never to oust former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, said Stephen Nix of IRI. But given the extent of political corruption in the country, IRI’s many good-government projects had roughly the same effect.

“Events show we’ve been pretty successful,” said Nix.

In a last-ditch effort to convince Shevardnadze that fair elections were the only way to sustain Georgia’s decade-old democracy, McCain traveled there in October to help launch a get-out-the-vote drive and assure opposition parties that IRI and others would be watching the polls.

[sablefish]

6. I hate democracy at this point.

Democracy has devolved into meaning: Control of the press (or voting machines) and installing corporate/government mercenaries to kill off the opposition.. I hate it.

[Skip Intro]

7. USA may send US military to Georgia - article from May

USA may send US military to Georgia - article from May
http://www.rbcnews.com/free/20031205175834.shtml

RBC, 05.12.2003, Tbilisi 17:58:34.According to a source in the Georgian State Office, today's talks between US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the new Georgian authorities touched upon the presence of US military in Georgia. Rumsfeld said at a briefing after the talks that the USA was thinking about deploying direct-action corps in the region. However, neither specific recommendations were put forward nor actions taken in this respect as yet, he added.

The US official also reported that the program of military assistance to Georgia was approaching completion. Under the program, 2,750 special Georgian servicemen should be trained and equipped by the end of this year. The USA has already spent $64m for the program, and the US Defense Department and the Georgian Defense Ministry have just agreed that the program of military assistance would be continued.
---------

that's actually the entire report, here is another report one site saw fit to associate with this -

----------
Russian Ambassador: We Will Not Allow US Presence in Caspian
http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=7292


According to the Ambassador, there is no necessity, but US will in it. "The littoral countries themselves should ensure security in the Casðian without US intervention, which try to enter the region located in thousand kilometers of their borders," said Ryabov, stressing that the US would be ðresent in the region. "We will not allow it."
General Charles "Chuck" Wald, Deðuty Commander of the Íeadquarters of the U.S. Euroðean Command, stated in Baku late in November that the United States intends to launch imðlementing the ðroject related to security in the Casðian region in January 2004.

Wald said the ðroject to be realized in the Azerbaijani section of the Casðian would enable to control over under and above water areas, while information obtained would be immediately ðassed to the military leadershið.
----------

I've never heard of either of these sources, btw, just offering a possible couple of pieces to the puzzle.

[teryang]

8. Are the Russians going to abandon...

...their appeasement?

[bemildred]

10. I thought they already did with the Yukos business.

I would be interested if you had any thoughts on that.
My opinion was that Pooty-Poot intends to keep control of
Russian oil, and thought he could pull it off. So far,
he seems right.

This in Georgia would fit in as another assertion of Russian
power in it's own backyard.

Pooty-Poot needs to look strong politically anyway, that's his
political base, and the morons in the White House are really
making it easy for him to reassert Russian power. The fuckers
should be shot for treason, except that they obviously don't have
a clue.

[teryang]

11. I can't answer that

I am not well enough informed on current internal Russian developments. My judgement on their pattern of appeasement is based upon their unresponsiveness to very agressive American initiatives.

I have presumed that their laying down for the American expansion into theaters that are vital to traditional Russian national security interests is based upon corruption, disorganization and economic weakness.

Now Lithuania is going to join NATO? Come on! Russian weakness is all out of proportion to geo-political reality. It is almost as if there is a complete lack of a national perspective in Russia.

[bemildred]

12. Who can say?

I agree about the appeasement, and the reasons, the corruption
and decadence in the wake of the collapse of the USSR.

Putin seems to be riding a wave of Russian nationalist sentiment in
reaction to that, the elections just held support that, and he
also seems to be trying to reassert Russian power, but he has been
very cautious and oblique about it. He's a spook after all.

I have read some commentators that assert that Russian nationalist
popular sentiment was one of the driving forces behind the collapse
of the USSR, somewhat in the way that America First and isolationist
sentiment is likely to drive the coming collapse of the American
national security state.

I speculate that he's waiting to see how Iraq plays out, and other
things, there is no reason to make a fuss when we are so busy
destroying ourselves.

But he seems to have taken the initiative a bit more lately,
and I expect we will see more of that. He is a smart man,
and I expect he will continue the low profile and friendly face,
while working on the fundamental strengths of his country. He
seems a Russian patriot, rather than another of these corrupt
sparrowfarts; we'll have to see how fond he is of democratic
processes now that he has cemented his power.

Chechnya seems to be the one true boil on his ass, I don't see
any sign he's getting anywhere with that, or that he's likely too.
I was thinking that the interest in Georgia most likely ties in
with Chechnya.

Thanks for you thoughts.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

9. Shalikashvili's family history...

John M. Shalikashvili was born on 27 June 1936, in Warsaw, Poland. He is the grandson of a tsarist general whose family fled Georgia after it was conquered in 1921 by the Soviet Union. The old tsarists were known as White Russians (as opposed to the Red or Communist Russians) during the Russian Civil War, and when they lost, they quickly scattered throughout Europe. Most Georgians fleeing Soviet rule landed in Constantinople where they very quickly realized that they were not that welcome. Three primary places became the new homes for the Georgians: Poland, France, and Germany.

So, in November 1922, the Shalikashvili family left Constantinople and arrived in Poland some time later. The tsarist general's son, Dimitri Shalikashvili, the father of John M. Shalikashvili, already an officer in the Georgian Army, became a Polish army officer. He met and married Missy Rudiger-Bielajew, the daughter of former tsarist General and Count Rudiger-Bielajew, the former Adjutant to both Grand Duke Vladimir (who died), and Grand Duke Andrew, brothers of Emperor Alexander III. We now know that Dmitri's father and father-in-law were both generals in the tsarist army.

Dimitri was also a strong supporter of the rightwing political concept that the government knows what is best for its people, and he later participated with his Polish Army unit in a coup that established the dictatorial rule of Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935) in 1926.

It is safe to say that based on the background of both grandfather and father, John M. Shalikashvili grew up in a household that was rightwing, strongly anti-communist, and hated the Russians with a real passion. It should therefore come as no surprise that Dmitris' writings from 1920-1960 are archived in the library of the Hoover Institution, an extremist rightwing think tank.

While it is not clear from the available records where Dmitri lived after 1944, it is known that John M. Shalikashvili and his mother fled Poland in 1944 as the Soviet Army approached from the east, and settled in Germany. In 1952, young Shalikashvili immigrated to the U.S. with his mother at age sixteen and settled in Peoria, Ill.

John M. Shalikashvili was a good student, earning a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from Bradley University and a Master's in International Affairs from George Washington University.

In 1958, John M. Shalikashvili, age 22, was drafted into the army as a private and was accepted to Officer Candidate School. He graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1959, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Artillery. From 1958 until the collapse of the old Soviet Union, Shalikashvili was without a doubt a dedicated Cold Warrior. His political thinking is in tune with people like Paul Wolfowitz, Perl, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the individuals that surround the Bushies today. His career includes service in 1969 in Vietnam as a senior district advisor, Advisory Team 19, United States Military Assistance Command. He has also served in Italy, Korea, and Germany. His military education later included the completion of the Naval Command and Staff College and the United States Army War College.

[RPG-7]

13. Shevardnadze was our guy

He was our obedient tyrant. We wouldn't have wanted to replace him. Powells little talk is the same one that our all failed dictators get when they are about to get shown the door: Marcos, Suharto, etc...

If anything I think the Russians are pissed that their own attempts to topple Shevardnadze accidently got out of hand and didn't lead to a pro-Moscow figure taking control so now they are going to blame us.

[bemildred]

14. What good are enemies if you can't blame stuff on them?

[RPG-7]

16. of course..

Russia whining about us instaling puppets in the region is enough to make my irony meter blow. Not that Islam Karimov isn't something that should make sane people vomit over and relegate a country that props him up and supports him as completely unable to credibly claim to be a supporter of democracy, but Russia has their own little monsters out there and it's all about the oil on both sides.

Armenia is where the US coup is going to go down. They play too nice with Iran and set a bad example of a Muslim nation and a Christian nation that co-exist and co-operate peacefully and successfuly.

[bemildred]

17. One man's "puppet" is another man's "firm friend and ally".

I hadn't heard anything about Armenia. Azerbayzdhan, Georgia,
Chechnya, Ossetia, Ingushetia, etc. sure, but not Armenia.
The Caucasus is a busy place.

[0007]

19. I think they got it right!

All these moustaches, especially James Baker have got to go. And ya just gotta know that Henry Kissinger is lurking in the background and is up the ass of this administration.

[loudsue]

20. Can someone connect these dots for me??

I must have been away from DU on the days these dots were being connected. How do

Poppy going to Russia
Poppy coming home & resigning from Carlyle
Pootie Poot jailing the chief corporatist/oilman in Russia
James Baker strutting his stuff re: stealing election 2000 & being put in charge of Iraq's $$

all tie together? I keep getting the feeling that one minute Pootie Poot seems to be pulling strings to HELP the cabal, and with the other hand, undermining the cabal. What's he up to, and what did Poppy have to do with it?

I have no doubt oil and power and "Bush mob activities" are at the heart of any and everything going on. But how do these things relate?

Thanks in advance.....

:kick: