So you still think World War III is just a figment of doom and gloom preacher’s imagination? Think again. Last year with the Georgia-Russian war, the world was on the brink of a world war – World War III. Far fetched fantasty? Read the following extract from an article on GlobalResearch.ca, titled The War That Was, The World War That Might Have Been:
What a resumption of fighting between Georgia and South Ossetia will entail is indicated by an examination of the scale of the catastrophe that was narrowly averted a year ago.
A few days ago the government of Abkhazia shared information on what Georgia planned had its invasion of South Ossetia proven successful. The plan was to, having launched the war on the day of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing while world attention was diverted, have Georgian troops and armor rapidly advance to the Roki Tunnel which connects South Ossetia with the Russian Republic of North Ossetia and prevent Russia from bringing reinforcements into the war zone.
Then a parallel assault on Abkhazia was to be launched. The government of Abkhazia documented Georgia’s battle plans earlier this week, stating “the attack could have been carried out from the sea and from the Kodori Gorge, where Georgian special forces were building their heavily fortified lines of defense.
“Most people in Abkhazia were almost certain that if Georgia succeeded in conquering Tskhinvali, their republic would have been next….Military intelligence issued a warning that the Georgian army was planning to invade Abkhazia from the sea. Another possibility was that the enemy would come from the Kodori Gorge, an area that Georgian special forces entered in 2006, violating international peace agreements.
“On August 9 last year, the Abkhazian army launched a preventive attack against Georgian troops in the Kodori Gorge.” [34]
Last week Abkhazian Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba demonstrated that Georgia was not alone in the planned attack on and destruction of his nation when he said “[W]e have always emphasized that the U.S. bears considerable responsibility for the events that took place in August 2008 in South Ossetia.
“Therefore, we do not trust the Americans. All these years the U.S. has been arming, equipping and training Georgian troops and continues to do so, again restoring military infrastructure, and again preparing the Georgian army for new acts of aggression.
“What were the American instructors training the Georgian army for here, on Abkhazia’s territory, at the upper end of the Kodori Gorge? For an attack on Abkhazia.” [35]
An August 7 report from an Armenian news source substantiated that the plans for last August’s war were on a far larger scale than merely Georgia’s brutal onslaught against South Ossetia in an attempt to conquer and subjugate it and later Abkhazia. Stating that neighboring Azerbaijan was simultaneously planning for a war against Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh, a political analyst was quoted as saying, “Armenia would be in a state of war should Georgia’s plan not have failed in 2008,” adding that “last year Azerbaijan thrice attempted attacks on the NKR [the Nagorno Karabakh Republic], yet the attempts were frustrated thanks to NKR forces.” [36]
A coordinated attack by Georgia on South Ossetia and Abkhazia and by Azerbaijan on Nagorno Karabakh would have led to a regional conflagration and possibly a world war. As indicated above, Armenia would have been pulled into the fighting and the nation is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) along with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
A week ago the secretary general of the CSTO, Nikolai Bordyuzha, was quoted as asserting:
“How will the CSTO react if Azerbaijan wants to get back Nagorno Karabakh in a military way and war begins between Azerbaijan and Armenia?”
“The 4th term of the Collective Security Treaty says that aggression against one member of Collective Security Treaty Organization will be regarded as aggression against all members.” [37]
Even if the CSTO had not responded to an Azerbaijani assault on Karabakh which would have ineluctably dragged member state Armenia into the fighting as it was obligated to do, Turkey would have intervened at that point on behalf of Azerbaijan and being a NATO member could have asked the Alliance to invoke its Article 5 military assistance clause and enter the fray. Russia would not have stood by idly and a war could have ensued that would also have pulled in Ukraine to the north and Iran to the south. In fact the U.S. client regime in Ukraine had provided advanced arms to Georgia for last year’s conflict and threatened to block the return of Russian Black Sea fleet ships to Sevastopol in the Crimea during the fighting.
Along with synchronized attacks on South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh, Ukraine may well have been ordered to move its military into the site of the fourth so-called frozen conflict, neighoring Transdniester, either in conjunction with Moldova or independently.
A year ago Russian maintained (and still has) peacekeepers in Transdniester, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and, while not in Karabakh, also in Armenia. Over 200 Russian soldiers were killed and wounded in the fighting in South Ossetia and if those numbers had been matched or exceeded in three other battle zones Russian forbearance might have reached its limits quickly.
After Yugoslavia, Afghanistan And Iraq: Pentagon Turns Attention To Former Soviet Space
In June of 2008 the earlier quoted Russian analyst Andrei Areshev wrote in article titled “The West and Abkhazia: A New Game” that “The prevention of a military conflict is Russia’s priority, but it is not a priority for our ‘partners.’
“This should not be forgotten….As for experiments undertaken by the United States that acted so ‘perfectly’ in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, they do not spell any good.” [38]
Two months before he had written “The U.S., the ground having slipped from under its feet in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now preoccupied with gaining control over the most important geopolitical regions in the post-Soviet territory – Ukraine, Transcaucasia and Central Asia….
“The regions of Transcaucasia, integrated in NATO, Georgia in the first place (especially in case of the successful annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia), will serve U.S. interests aimed at destabilization of the North Caucasus.” [39]
Last week a group of opposition Georgian scholars held a round table discussion in the nation’s capital and among other matters asserted:
“The whole August war itself…served the interests of the US. The Americans tested Russia’s readiness to react to military intervention, while at the same time ridding Georgia of its conflict-ridden territories so it could continue its pursuit of NATO membership.
“[H]ad Russia refrained from engaging its forces in the conflict, the nations [republics] of the Northern Caucasus would have serious doubts about its ability to protect them. This would in turn lead to an array of separatist movements in the Northern Caucasus, which would have the potential to start not only a full-scale Caucasian war, but a new world war.” [40]
What the West’s probing of Russia’s defenses in the Caucasus may be intended to achieve and what the full-scale application of the Yugoslav model to Russia’s North Caucasus republics could look like are not academic issues.
Armed attacks in the republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia have been almost daily occurrences over the last few months. In June the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was seriously wounded in a bomb attack and two days ago the republic’s Construction Minister was shot to death in his office.
Similar armed attacks on and slayings of police, military and government officials are mounting in Dagestan and Chechnya.
The shootings and bombings are perpetrated by separatists hiding behind the pretext of religious motivations – in the main Saudi-based Wahhabism. Until his death in 2002 the main military commander of various self-proclaimed entities like the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the Caucasus Emirate was one Khattab (reputedly born Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem), an ethnic Arab and veteran of the CIA’s Afghan campaign of the 1980s, who also reportedly fought later in Tajikistan and Bosnia.
Assorted self-designated presidents and defense ministers of the above fancied domains have been granted political refugee status by and are living comfortably in the United States and Britain.
That plans for carving up Russia by employing Yugoslav-style armed secessionist campaigns are not limited to foreign-supported extremist troops was demonstrated as early as 1999 – the year of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia – when the conservative Freedom House think tank in the United States inaugurated what it called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. By the middle of this decade its board of directors was composed of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, Steven Solarz, and Max Kampelman.
Members included the three main directors of the Project for the New American Century: Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Bruce P. Jackson. Jackson was the founder and president of the US Committee on NATO (founded in 1996) and the chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (launched months before the invasion of that nation in the autumn of 2002).
Other members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya included past CIA directors, National Security Advisers, Secretaries of State and NATO Supreme Allied Commanders like the previously mentioned Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haig and James Woolsey, Richard V. Allen and a host of neoconservative ideologues and George W. Bush administration operatives with resumes ranging from the Committee on the Present Danger to the Project for the New American Century like Morton Abramowitz, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes and Norman Podhoretz.
The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya has evidently broadened its scope and is now called the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus. Its mission statement says:
“The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC) at Freedom House is dedicated to monitoring the security and human rights situation in the North Caucasus by providing informational resources and expert analysis. ACPC focuses on Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Adygeya, as well as the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.”
Abkhazia and South Ossetia are of course in the South Caucasus and not in Georgia except in the minds of those anxious to expel Russia from the Caucasus, North and South, and transparently have been included as they are targets of designs by U.S. empire builders to further encircle, weaken and ultimately dismantle the Russian Federation.
Russian political leadership has been reserved if not outright compliant over the past decade when the U.S. and NATO attacked Yugoslavia, invaded Afghanistan and set up military bases throughout Central and South Asia, invaded Iraq in 2003, assisted in deposing governments in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Adjaria, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan to Russia’s disadvantage and brazenly boasted of plans to drive Russia out of the European energy market.
But intensifying the destabilization of its southern republics and turning them into new Kosovos is more than Moscow can allow.
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