Georgia Tries out the Bush War Doctrine, Loses Badly

[one...two...tree 2,762]

By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that #######, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock and awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then, uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the U.S.-China basketball game. I didn't even recognize Bush at first; I just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naive because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians' old enemy, the United States, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect, obedient little ally. Then we'd let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and iPods.

Their part of the deal was simple: They sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then, surprisingly, 2,000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than 5 million, that's a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the "Coalition of the Willing," after the United States and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that's true, and it goes for a lot of countries -- like us, for instance -- but at least we're not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they're sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give them a lift?

We'll probably give them a ride, but that's about all we can do. We've already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline is staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, "Georgia Train and Equip" project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the U.S. Army has learned recently. Now here's the joke. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in northeast Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in D.C., that they thought they could take on anybody. What they're in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry counterinsurgency force like the one we gave them isn't much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what "disproportionate" means is -- well, imagine that you're watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ### whipped by a bully, and you say, "That's inappropriate!" I mean, instead of actually helping him. That's what "disproportionate" means from the Pentagon: "We're not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we're with you in spirit, little buddy!"

The quickest way to see who's winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, "To fight Russia by ourselves is insane." Which means they thought Russia wouldn't back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies -- but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, just 10 years earlier without helping. That's the thing: The bastards are unpredictable. You can't even count on them to betray their friends (though it's the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the United States is all tied up in that ####### Iraq War; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naive, idiotic allies like Georgia. It's a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it's the fact that the United States is weaker than it was 10 years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn't matter that much. I'm just being honest here. In a year, nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What's more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

Even so, the great Russian-Ossetian land grab will make great material for another few centuries of gloating, ballads, blood oaths, revenge and counter-grabs. In this part of the world, there's always something to avenge.

This is an adapted version of an essay by Brecher that appeared on eXiled online.

War Nerd by Gary Brecher (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work on eXiled online.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/94706/georg...2C_loses_badly/

[Peikko 1,575]

Oh, just nuke the lot of them. The world has too many people in it, it's time for another 'big war' to purge the human race down to a proper size, then we will not need to worry about the price of oil or global warming or any of this other #######. We'll either be dead and kill the planet stone dead too, or there will be little pockets of survivors huddled round a little fire.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Steven,

Always the contrarian!

And here I thought "Russia-Bad, Anyone Else-Good" was a position we could all, as Americans, come together on!

But no, you have to go find out for yourself, read Soviet propaganda outlets like CNN and the New York Times. Shame on you.

[Ban Hammer 13,352]

Steven,

Always the contrarian!

And here I thought "Russia-Bad, Anyone Else-Good" was a position we could all, as Americans, come together on!

But no, you have to go find out for yourself, read Soviet propaganda outlets like CNN and the New York Times. Shame on you.

any doubts now about him being a communist?

Edited August 12, 2008 by charles!

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Steven,

Always the contrarian!

And here I thought "Russia-Bad, Anyone Else-Good" was a position we could all, as Americans, come together on!

But no, you have to go find out for yourself, read Soviet propaganda outlets like CNN and the New York Times. Shame on you.

A few days ago, I really had no grasp of what was happening in Georgia. I'm still trying to understand it better. I thought this guy's essay really helped explain the situation more.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

WSJ:

Despite the U.S. warnings, many officials in the U.S. government who have worked on the Russia relationship in recent years said, President Bush lionized Mr. Saakashvili as a model for democracy in the region to a point that the Georgian leader may have held unrealistic expectations about the amount of support he might receive from the U.S. and the West.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1218490386...s_us_whats_news

.......

NYT:

The Bush administration, with its broad assurances of support for Georgia, has come in for strong criticism in Georgia for having emboldened Mr. Saakashvili to challenge Russia.

But Mr. Saakashvili has resisted the notion that he was somehow taken in. Asked in a recent interview on CNN if he believed Georgia could win against Russia militarily, Mr. Saakashvili said, “I am not crazy.”

But many here say he is headstrong and reckless, endangering the country’s security by rashly ordering an attack on the Russian enclave of South Ossetia on the eve of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and badly underestimating Russia’s determination to respond militarily. The critics say he has shown he is willing to put his ambition ahead of the best interests of his people.

Bold gambles and dramatic gestures have always been part of Mr. Saakashvili’s political arsenal, however, and no small amount of his appeal. So, too, has been his inclination to torment his increasingly powerful neighbor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/world/eu...amp;oref=slogin

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Brecher missed a few other pertinent facts:

• Putin does have a "czar Vlad" mentality, and hates to be opposed (and also doesn't let a detail such as the opponent being in another country deter him--see Litvinenko case). "Mad Czar Vlad" has a dream of ruling original Russian Empire (which included ENTIRE Republic of Georgia)
• While the mad czar doesn't actually care for the South Ossetians, he's not above using them as an excuse to invade Georgia
• Due to US election with mandatory change of president, he sees the time between now and January as "time to roll"

[alienlovechild 75]

Amazing how many leftists can side with with any almost tranny as long as it's anti-American. Especially if it is anti-Bush.

Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help.

Pure BS. Only and idiot would believe Bush egged on the Georgians and risk a conflict with Russia.

"The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it."

How come if the U.S. does that it's a war crime but if Russia does it prefectly acceptable?

"most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat."

They have NOTHING to do with one another. Yugoslavia was never controlled by the old USSR.

The Russians must have had an invasion plan for long time to move that many troops so quickly. The Georgian army was acting in Georgia but the Russians have the oil money now and they know nobody is going to war for Georgia.

The thing that bothers me is the gloating over a conflict and death as some weird slight on Bush. If Russia attacks Ukraine or the Baltic Republics with under Pres. Obama at the helm, will we get the same lame jokes? I don't think the Russians have to worry much with Obama in the White House.

Edited August 12, 2008 by alienlovechild

[zqt3344 21]

Good to see you have interest in other parts of world. But comrade, let me correct you and open your eyes up to what is really going on in the Black Sea region. Russia sent in what they called peacekeepers($hit distruber military forces) into South Ossetia(which is mostly Russian leaning and all have Russian citizenship still going back to 1991 when they broke away from Georgia and declared their independence from Georgia and loyalty to Mother Russia) Then followed Abkhazia region in the western part of Georgia that borders Russia and the Black Sea. What you need to realize is this, Russia provoked this skirmish with Georgia and has been doing so now for many years, and Russia has been building up troops and tanks and planes and all kinds of military weapons and support along the Georgia border now for over 2-3 years preparing for this moment. Those supposed Russian peacekeepers went in last week and aided local rebel Georgian Russian in South Ossetia to fire upon and attack Georgian soldiers, after many such excursions Georgia had enough and finally retaliated and thus invaded South Ossetia to weed out all the rebels(or terrorists as we would call them, just like what Al Queda and Hizbellah do to the USA per Iran and Bin Laden in Iraq, Russia is doing to Georgia just looking for an excuse to go in and invade Georgia) thus making it all look excusable in international eyes that poor Russia was only protecting itself from lawless Georgia. Another thing at play here is that the Georgia government is pro USA and NATO. This has severely pissed off Mother Russia and they do not want any USA missile bases planted there at all. And lastly there are two major oil and gas pipelines that have been built over past 3 years by USA or Western oil/gas companies going around Mother Russia and through Southern Georgia to the Black Sea and to Turkey, thus no control over energy by Mother Russia who is known to use that as leverage each and every winter to get control over countries governments to do as they want. And on a side note, Ukraine has never resolved the issue of the Black Sea Fleet left in the Ukraine port of Svestapol after the fall of Russia in 1989. Ukraine still claims ownership to that port and Russia says that it is theirs, and just other day Ukraine told Russia if they send out any ships or subs from that port to go to Georgia, their friend and neighbor, that they would not be a part of the fighting and would not allow the Russia ships and subs back into the port. IN essence, GWB had nothing to do with this Bush Doctrine in Georgia as you imply.

By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that #######, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock and awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then, uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the U.S.-China basketball game. I didn't even recognize Bush at first; I just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naive because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians' old enemy, the United States, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect, obedient little ally. Then we'd let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and iPods.

Their part of the deal was simple: They sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then, surprisingly, 2,000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than 5 million, that's a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the "Coalition of the Willing," after the United States and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that's true, and it goes for a lot of countries -- like us, for instance -- but at least we're not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they're sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give them a lift?

We'll probably give them a ride, but that's about all we can do. We've already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline is staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, "Georgia Train and Equip" project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the U.S. Army has learned recently. Now here's the joke. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in northeast Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in D.C., that they thought they could take on anybody. What they're in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry counterinsurgency force like the one we gave them isn't much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what "disproportionate" means is -- well, imagine that you're watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ### whipped by a bully, and you say, "That's inappropriate!" I mean, instead of actually helping him. That's what "disproportionate" means from the Pentagon: "We're not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we're with you in spirit, little buddy!"

The quickest way to see who's winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, "To fight Russia by ourselves is insane." Which means they thought Russia wouldn't back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies -- but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, just 10 years earlier without helping. That's the thing: The bastards are unpredictable. You can't even count on them to betray their friends (though it's the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the United States is all tied up in that ####### Iraq War; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naive, idiotic allies like Georgia. It's a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it's the fact that the United States is weaker than it was 10 years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn't matter that much. I'm just being honest here. In a year, nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What's more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

Even so, the great Russian-Ossetian land grab will make great material for another few centuries of gloating, ballads, blood oaths, revenge and counter-grabs. In this part of the world, there's always something to avenge.

This is an adapted version of an essay by Brecher that appeared on eXiled online.

War Nerd by Gary Brecher (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work on eXiled online.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/94706/georg...2C_loses_badly/

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

You think bold is annoying?

Well how about a whole body of text in orange?

Etymology

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.

Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[edit] The essay as a pedagogical tool

In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.

Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.

[edit] The five-paragraph essay

Main article: Five paragraph essay

Some students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.

[edit] Academic essays

Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities. Some types of essays are:

[edit] Descriptive

Descriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader’s emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities characterize a description. Determining your purpose, considering your audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing your description are the rhetorical choices to consider with a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can be chronological or emphatic as well. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression.[2]

[edit] Narrative

A narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative an author must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish a point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.[3]

[edit] Exemplification

An exemplification essay is characterized by a generalization and relevant, representative, and believable examples including anecdotes. A writer needs to consider their subject, determine their purpose, consider their audience, decide on specific examples, and arrange all the parts together when writing and exemplification essay.[4]

[edit] Comparison and Contrast

Compare and contrast is characterized by a basis for comparison, points of comparison, analogies, and either comparison by object (chunking) or by point (sequential). Comparison highlights the differences between two or more similar objects while contrasting highlights the differences between two or more objects. When writing a compare\contrast essay, a writer needs to determine their purpose, consider their audience, consider the basis and points of comparison, consider their thesis statement, arrange and develop the comparison, and reach a conclusion. Compare and contrast is arranged emphatically.[5]

[edit] Cause and Effect

The defining features of a cause and effect essay are causal chains, careful language, and chronological or emphatic order. A writer using this rhetorical method must consider the subject, determine the purpose, consider the audience, think critically about different causes or consequences, consider a thesis statement, arrange the parts, consider the language, and decide on a conclusion.[6]

[edit] Classification and division

Classification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts.[7]

[edit] Definition

Definition essays are explanations of what is meant by a term.[8]

[edit] Dialectic

In this form of essay used commonly in Philosophy, one makes a thesis and argument, then objects to their own argument (with a counterargument), but then counters the counterargument with a final and novel argument. This form benefits from being more open-minded while countering a possible flaw that some may present.[9]

[edit] Non-literary essays

[edit] Visual Arts

In the visual arts, an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch upon which a final painting or sculpture is based, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word essay's meaning of "attempt" or "trial").

[edit] Music

In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.

[edit] Film

Film essays are cinematic forms of the essay, with the film consisting of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se; or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a documentary film visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life-story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet documentarians like Dziga Vertov, or present-day filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris. Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays".[10]

Good to see you have interest in other parts of world. But comrade, let me correct you and open your eyes up to what is really going on in the Black Sea region. Russia sent in what they called peacekeepers($hit distruber military forces) into South Ossetia(which is mostly Russian leaning and all have Russian citizenship still going back to 1991 when they broke away from Georgia and declared their independence from Georgia and loyalty to Mother Russia) Then followed Abkhazia region in the western part of Georgia that borders Russia and the Black Sea. What you need to realize is this, Russia provoked this skirmish with Georgia and has been doing so now for many years, and Russia has been building up troops and tanks and planes and all kinds of military weapons and support along the Georgia border now for over 2-3 years preparing for this moment. Those supposed Russian peacekeepers went in last week and aided local rebel Georgian Russian in South Ossetia to fire upon and attack Georgian soldiers, after many such excursions Georgia had enough and finally retaliated and thus invaded South Ossetia to weed out all the rebels(or terrorists as we would call them, just like what Al Queda and Hizbellah do to the USA per Iran and Bin Laden in Iraq, Russia is doing to Georgia just looking for an excuse to go in and invade Georgia) thus making it all look excusable in international eyes that poor Russia was only protecting itself from lawless Georgia. Another thing at play here is that the Georgia government is pro USA and NATO. This has severely pissed off Mother Russia and they do not want any USA missile bases planted there at all. And lastly there are two major oil and gas pipelines that have been built over past 3 years by USA or Western oil/gas companies going around Mother Russia and through Southern Georgia to the Black Sea and to Turkey, thus no control over energy by Mother Russia who is known to use that as leverage each and every winter to get control over countries governments to do as they want. And on a side note, Ukraine has never resolved the issue of the Black Sea Fleet left in the Ukraine port of Svestapol after the fall of Russia in 1989. Ukraine still claims ownership to that port and Russia says that it is theirs, and just other day Ukraine told Russia if they send out any ships or subs from that port to go to Georgia, their friend and neighbor, that they would not be a part of the fighting and would not allow the Russia ships and subs back into the port. IN essence, GWB had nothing to do with this Bush Doctrine in Georgia as you imply.

By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that #######, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock and awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then, uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the U.S.-China basketball game. I didn't even recognize Bush at first; I just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naive because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians' old enemy, the United States, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect, obedient little ally. Then we'd let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and iPods.

Their part of the deal was simple: They sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then, surprisingly, 2,000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than 5 million, that's a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the "Coalition of the Willing," after the United States and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that's true, and it goes for a lot of countries -- like us, for instance -- but at least we're not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they're sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give them a lift?

We'll probably give them a ride, but that's about all we can do. We've already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline is staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, "Georgia Train and Equip" project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the U.S. Army has learned recently. Now here's the joke. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in northeast Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in D.C., that they thought they could take on anybody. What they're in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry counterinsurgency force like the one we gave them isn't much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what "disproportionate" means is -- well, imagine that you're watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ### whipped by a bully, and you say, "That's inappropriate!" I mean, instead of actually helping him. That's what "disproportionate" means from the Pentagon: "We're not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we're with you in spirit, little buddy!"

The quickest way to see who's winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, "To fight Russia by ourselves is insane." Which means they thought Russia wouldn't back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies -- but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, just 10 years earlier without helping. That's the thing: The bastards are unpredictable. You can't even count on them to betray their friends (though it's the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the United States is all tied up in that ####### Iraq War; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naive, idiotic allies like Georgia. It's a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it's the fact that the United States is weaker than it was 10 years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn't matter that much. I'm just being honest here. In a year, nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What's more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

Even so, the great Russian-Ossetian land grab will make great material for another few centuries of gloating, ballads, blood oaths, revenge and counter-grabs. In this part of the world, there's always something to avenge.

This is an adapted version of an essay by Brecher that appeared on eXiled online.

War Nerd by Gary Brecher (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work on eXiled online.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/94706/georg...2C_loses_badly/

[HAL 9000 96]

[Peikko 1,575]

You are the evil doer, begone I say, begone!

You think bold is annoying?

Well how about a whole body of text in orange?

Etymology

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.

Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[edit] The essay as a pedagogical tool

In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.

Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.

[edit] The five-paragraph essay

Main article: Five paragraph essay

Some students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.

[edit] Academic essays

Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities. Some types of essays are:

[edit] Descriptive

Descriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader's emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities characterize a description. Determining your purpose, considering your audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing your description are the rhetorical choices to consider with a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can be chronological or emphatic as well. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression.[2]

[edit] Narrative

A narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative an author must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish a point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.[3]

[edit] Exemplification

An exemplification essay is characterized by a generalization and relevant, representative, and believable examples including anecdotes. A writer needs to consider their subject, determine their purpose, consider their audience, decide on specific examples, and arrange all the parts together when writing and exemplification essay.[4]

[edit] Comparison and Contrast

Compare and contrast is characterized by a basis for comparison, points of comparison, analogies, and either comparison by object (chunking) or by point (sequential). Comparison highlights the differences between two or more similar objects while contrasting highlights the differences between two or more objects. When writing a compare\contrast essay, a writer needs to determine their purpose, consider their audience, consider the basis and points of comparison, consider their thesis statement, arrange and develop the comparison, and reach a conclusion. Compare and contrast is arranged emphatically.[5]

[edit] Cause and Effect

The defining features of a cause and effect essay are causal chains, careful language, and chronological or emphatic order. A writer using this rhetorical method must consider the subject, determine the purpose, consider the audience, think critically about different causes or consequences, consider a thesis statement, arrange the parts, consider the language, and decide on a conclusion.[6]

[edit] Classification and division

Classification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts.[7]

[edit] Definition

Definition essays are explanations of what is meant by a term.[8]

[edit] Dialectic

In this form of essay used commonly in Philosophy, one makes a thesis and argument, then objects to their own argument (with a counterargument), but then counters the counterargument with a final and novel argument. This form benefits from being more open-minded while countering a possible flaw that some may present.[9]

[edit] Non-literary essays

[edit] Visual Arts

In the visual arts, an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch upon which a final painting or sculpture is based, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word essay's meaning of "attempt" or "trial").

[edit] Music

In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.

[edit] Film

Film essays are cinematic forms of the essay, with the film consisting of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se; or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a documentary film visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life-story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet documentarians like Dziga Vertov, or present-day filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris. Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays".[10]

Good to see you have interest in other parts of world. But comrade, let me correct you and open your eyes up to what is really going on in the Black Sea region. Russia sent in what they called peacekeepers($hit distruber military forces) into South Ossetia(which is mostly Russian leaning and all have Russian citizenship still going back to 1991 when they broke away from Georgia and declared their independence from Georgia and loyalty to Mother Russia) Then followed Abkhazia region in the western part of Georgia that borders Russia and the Black Sea. What you need to realize is this, Russia provoked this skirmish with Georgia and has been doing so now for many years, and Russia has been building up troops and tanks and planes and all kinds of military weapons and support along the Georgia border now for over 2-3 years preparing for this moment. Those supposed Russian peacekeepers went in last week and aided local rebel Georgian Russian in South Ossetia to fire upon and attack Georgian soldiers, after many such excursions Georgia had enough and finally retaliated and thus invaded South Ossetia to weed out all the rebels(or terrorists as we would call them, just like what Al Queda and Hizbellah do to the USA per Iran and Bin Laden in Iraq, Russia is doing to Georgia just looking for an excuse to go in and invade Georgia) thus making it all look excusable in international eyes that poor Russia was only protecting itself from lawless Georgia. Another thing at play here is that the Georgia government is pro USA and NATO. This has severely pissed off Mother Russia and they do not want any USA missile bases planted there at all. And lastly there are two major oil and gas pipelines that have been built over past 3 years by USA or Western oil/gas companies going around Mother Russia and through Southern Georgia to the Black Sea and to Turkey, thus no control over energy by Mother Russia who is known to use that as leverage each and every winter to get control over countries governments to do as they want. And on a side note, Ukraine has never resolved the issue of the Black Sea Fleet left in the Ukraine port of Svestapol after the fall of Russia in 1989. Ukraine still claims ownership to that port and Russia says that it is theirs, and just other day Ukraine told Russia if they send out any ships or subs from that port to go to Georgia, their friend and neighbor, that they would not be a part of the fighting and would not allow the Russia ships and subs back into the port. IN essence, GWB had nothing to do with this Bush Doctrine in Georgia as you imply.

By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that #######, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock and awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then, uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the U.S.-China basketball game. I didn't even recognize Bush at first; I just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naive because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians' old enemy, the United States, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect, obedient little ally. Then we'd let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and iPods.

Their part of the deal was simple: They sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then, surprisingly, 2,000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than 5 million, that's a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the "Coalition of the Willing," after the United States and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that's true, and it goes for a lot of countries -- like us, for instance -- but at least we're not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they're sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give them a lift?

We'll probably give them a ride, but that's about all we can do. We've already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline is staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, "Georgia Train and Equip" project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the U.S. Army has learned recently. Now here's the joke. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in northeast Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in D.C., that they thought they could take on anybody. What they're in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry counterinsurgency force like the one we gave them isn't much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what "disproportionate" means is -- well, imagine that you're watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ### whipped by a bully, and you say, "That's inappropriate!" I mean, instead of actually helping him. That's what "disproportionate" means from the Pentagon: "We're not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we're with you in spirit, little buddy!"

The quickest way to see who's winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, "To fight Russia by ourselves is insane." Which means they thought Russia wouldn't back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies -- but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, just 10 years earlier without helping. That's the thing: The bastards are unpredictable. You can't even count on them to betray their friends (though it's the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the United States is all tied up in that ####### Iraq War; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naive, idiotic allies like Georgia. It's a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it's the fact that the United States is weaker than it was 10 years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn't matter that much. I'm just being honest here. In a year, nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What's more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

Even so, the great Russian-Ossetian land grab will make great material for another few centuries of gloating, ballads, blood oaths, revenge and counter-grabs. In this part of the world, there's always something to avenge.

This is an adapted version of an essay by Brecher that appeared on eXiled online.

War Nerd by Gary Brecher (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work on eXiled online.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/94706/georg...2C_loses_badly/

[zqt3344 21]

AJ grow up please. If you have nothing intelligent to offer to this post then why bother.

You think bold is annoying?

Well how about a whole body of text in orange?

Etymology

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.

Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[edit] The essay as a pedagogical tool

In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.

Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.

[edit] The five-paragraph essay

Main article: Five paragraph essay

Some students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.

[edit] Academic essays

Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities. Some types of essays are:

[edit] Descriptive

Descriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader’s emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities characterize a description. Determining your purpose, considering your audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing your description are the rhetorical choices to consider with a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can be chronological or emphatic as well. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression.[2]

[edit] Narrative

A narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative an author must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish a point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.[3]

[edit] Exemplification

An exemplification essay is characterized by a generalization and relevant, representative, and believable examples including anecdotes. A writer needs to consider their subject, determine their purpose, consider their audience, decide on specific examples, and arrange all the parts together when writing and exemplification essay.[4]

[edit] Comparison and Contrast

Compare and contrast is characterized by a basis for comparison, points of comparison, analogies, and either comparison by object (chunking) or by point (sequential). Comparison highlights the differences between two or more similar objects while contrasting highlights the differences between two or more objects. When writing a compare\contrast essay, a writer needs to determine their purpose, consider their audience, consider the basis and points of comparison, consider their thesis statement, arrange and develop the comparison, and reach a conclusion. Compare and contrast is arranged emphatically.[5]

[edit] Cause and Effect

The defining features of a cause and effect essay are causal chains, careful language, and chronological or emphatic order. A writer using this rhetorical method must consider the subject, determine the purpose, consider the audience, think critically about different causes or consequences, consider a thesis statement, arrange the parts, consider the language, and decide on a conclusion.[6]

[edit] Classification and division

Classification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts.[7]

[edit] Definition

Definition essays are explanations of what is meant by a term.[8]

[edit] Dialectic

In this form of essay used commonly in Philosophy, one makes a thesis and argument, then objects to their own argument (with a counterargument), but then counters the counterargument with a final and novel argument. This form benefits from being more open-minded while countering a possible flaw that some may present.[9]

[edit] Non-literary essays

[edit] Visual Arts

In the visual arts, an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch upon which a final painting or sculpture is based, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word essay's meaning of "attempt" or "trial").

[edit] Music

In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.

[edit] Film

Film essays are cinematic forms of the essay, with the film consisting of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se; or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a documentary film visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life-story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet documentarians like Dziga Vertov, or present-day filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris. Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays".[10]

Good to see you have interest in other parts of world. But comrade, let me correct you and open your eyes up to what is really going on in the Black Sea region. Russia sent in what they called peacekeepers($hit distruber military forces) into South Ossetia(which is mostly Russian leaning and all have Russian citizenship still going back to 1991 when they broke away from Georgia and declared their independence from Georgia and loyalty to Mother Russia) Then followed Abkhazia region in the western part of Georgia that borders Russia and the Black Sea. What you need to realize is this, Russia provoked this skirmish with Georgia and has been doing so now for many years, and Russia has been building up troops and tanks and planes and all kinds of military weapons and support along the Georgia border now for over 2-3 years preparing for this moment. Those supposed Russian peacekeepers went in last week and aided local rebel Georgian Russian in South Ossetia to fire upon and attack Georgian soldiers, after many such excursions Georgia had enough and finally retaliated and thus invaded South Ossetia to weed out all the rebels(or terrorists as we would call them, just like what Al Queda and Hizbellah do to the USA per Iran and Bin Laden in Iraq, Russia is doing to Georgia just looking for an excuse to go in and invade Georgia) thus making it all look excusable in international eyes that poor Russia was only protecting itself from lawless Georgia. Another thing at play here is that the Georgia government is pro USA and NATO. This has severely pissed off Mother Russia and they do not want any USA missile bases planted there at all. And lastly there are two major oil and gas pipelines that have been built over past 3 years by USA or Western oil/gas companies going around Mother Russia and through Southern Georgia to the Black Sea and to Turkey, thus no control over energy by Mother Russia who is known to use that as leverage each and every winter to get control over countries governments to do as they want. And on a side note, Ukraine has never resolved the issue of the Black Sea Fleet left in the Ukraine port of Svestapol after the fall of Russia in 1989. Ukraine still claims ownership to that port and Russia says that it is theirs, and just other day Ukraine told Russia if they send out any ships or subs from that port to go to Georgia, their friend and neighbor, that they would not be a part of the fighting and would not allow the Russia ships and subs back into the port. IN essence, GWB had nothing to do with this Bush Doctrine in Georgia as you imply.

By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that #######, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock and awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then, uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the U.S.-China basketball game. I didn't even recognize Bush at first; I just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naive because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians' old enemy, the United States, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect, obedient little ally. Then we'd let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and iPods.

Their part of the deal was simple: They sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then, surprisingly, 2,000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than 5 million, that's a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the "Coalition of the Willing," after the United States and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that's true, and it goes for a lot of countries -- like us, for instance -- but at least we're not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they're sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give them a lift?

We'll probably give them a ride, but that's about all we can do. We've already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline is staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, "Georgia Train and Equip" project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the U.S. Army has learned recently. Now here's the joke. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in northeast Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in D.C., that they thought they could take on anybody. What they're in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry counterinsurgency force like the one we gave them isn't much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what "disproportionate" means is -- well, imagine that you're watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ### whipped by a bully, and you say, "That's inappropriate!" I mean, instead of actually helping him. That's what "disproportionate" means from the Pentagon: "We're not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we're with you in spirit, little buddy!"

The quickest way to see who's winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, "To fight Russia by ourselves is insane." Which means they thought Russia wouldn't back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies -- but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, just 10 years earlier without helping. That's the thing: The bastards are unpredictable. You can't even count on them to betray their friends (though it's the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the United States is all tied up in that ####### Iraq War; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naive, idiotic allies like Georgia. It's a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it's the fact that the United States is weaker than it was 10 years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn't matter that much. I'm just being honest here. In a year, nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What's more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

Even so, the great Russian-Ossetian land grab will make great material for another few centuries of gloating, ballads, blood oaths, revenge and counter-grabs. In this part of the world, there's always something to avenge.

This is an adapted version of an essay by Brecher that appeared on eXiled online.

War Nerd by Gary Brecher (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work on eXiled online.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/94706/georg...2C_loses_badly/

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

HAHAHAHA

You are the evil doer, begone I say, begone!

You think bold is annoying?

Well how about a whole body of text in orange?

Etymology

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.

Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[edit] The essay as a pedagogical tool

In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.

Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.

[edit] The five-paragraph essay

Main article: Five paragraph essay

Some students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.

[edit] Academic essays

Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities. Some types of essays are:

[edit] Descriptive

Descriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader's emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities characterize a description. Determining your purpose, considering your audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing your description are the rhetorical choices to consider with a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can be chronological or emphatic as well. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression.[2]

[edit] Narrative

A narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative an author must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish a point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.[3]

[edit] Exemplification

An exemplification essay is characterized by a generalization and relevant, representative, and believable examples including anecdotes. A writer needs to consider their subject, determine their purpose, consider their audience, decide on specific examples, and arrange all the parts together when writing and exemplification essay.[4]

[edit] Comparison and Contrast

Compare and contrast is characterized by a basis for comparison, points of comparison, analogies, and either comparison by object (chunking) or by point (sequential). Comparison highlights the differences between two or more similar objects while contrasting highlights the differences between two or more objects. When writing a compare\contrast essay, a writer needs to determine their purpose, consider their audience, consider the basis and points of comparison, consider their thesis statement, arrange and develop the comparison, and reach a conclusion. Compare and contrast is arranged emphatically.[5]

[edit] Cause and Effect

The defining features of a cause and effect essay are causal chains, careful language, and chronological or emphatic order. A writer using this rhetorical method must consider the subject, determine the purpose, consider the audience, think critically about different causes or consequences, consider a thesis statement, arrange the parts, consider the language, and decide on a conclusion.[6]

[edit] Classification and division

Classification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts.[7]

[edit] Definition

Definition essays are explanations of what is meant by a term.[8]

[edit] Dialectic

In this form of essay used commonly in Philosophy, one makes a thesis and argument, then objects to their own argument (with a counterargument), but then counters the counterargument with a final and novel argument. This form benefits from being more open-minded while countering a possible flaw that some may present.[9]

[edit] Non-literary essays

[edit] Visual Arts

In the visual arts, an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch upon which a final painting or sculpture is based, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word essay's meaning of "attempt" or "trial").

[edit] Music

In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.

[edit] Film

Film essays are cinematic forms of the essay, with the film consisting of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se; or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a documentary film visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life-story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet documentarians like Dziga Vertov, or present-day filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris. Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays".[10]

Good to see you have interest in other parts of world. But comrade, let me correct you and open your eyes up to what is really going on in the Black Sea region. Russia sent in what they called peacekeepers($hit distruber military forces) into South Ossetia(which is mostly Russian leaning and all have Russian citizenship still going back to 1991 when they broke away from Georgia and declared their independence from Georgia and loyalty to Mother Russia) Then followed Abkhazia region in the western part of Georgia that borders Russia and the Black Sea. What you need to realize is this, Russia provoked this skirmish with Georgia and has been doing so now for many years, and Russia has been building up troops and tanks and planes and all kinds of military weapons and support along the Georgia border now for over 2-3 years preparing for this moment. Those supposed Russian peacekeepers went in last week and aided local rebel Georgian Russian in South Ossetia to fire upon and attack Georgian soldiers, after many such excursions Georgia had enough and finally retaliated and thus invaded South Ossetia to weed out all the rebels(or terrorists as we would call them, just like what Al Queda and Hizbellah do to the USA per Iran and Bin Laden in Iraq, Russia is doing to Georgia just looking for an excuse to go in and invade Georgia) thus making it all look excusable in international eyes that poor Russia was only protecting itself from lawless Georgia. Another thing at play here is that the Georgia government is pro USA and NATO. This has severely pissed off Mother Russia and they do not want any USA missile bases planted there at all. And lastly there are two major oil and gas pipelines that have been built over past 3 years by USA or Western oil/gas companies going around Mother Russia and through Southern Georgia to the Black Sea and to Turkey, thus no control over energy by Mother Russia who is known to use that as leverage each and every winter to get control over countries governments to do as they want. And on a side note, Ukraine has never resolved the issue of the Black Sea Fleet left in the Ukraine port of Svestapol after the fall of Russia in 1989. Ukraine still claims ownership to that port and Russia says that it is theirs, and just other day Ukraine told Russia if they send out any ships or subs from that port to go to Georgia, their friend and neighbor, that they would not be a part of the fighting and would not allow the Russia ships and subs back into the port. IN essence, GWB had nothing to do with this Bush Doctrine in Georgia as you imply.

By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that #######, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock and awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then, uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the U.S.-China basketball game. I didn't even recognize Bush at first; I just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naive because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians' old enemy, the United States, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect, obedient little ally. Then we'd let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and iPods.

Their part of the deal was simple: They sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then, surprisingly, 2,000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than 5 million, that's a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the "Coalition of the Willing," after the United States and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that's true, and it goes for a lot of countries -- like us, for instance -- but at least we're not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they're sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give them a lift?

We'll probably give them a ride, but that's about all we can do. We've already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline is staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, "Georgia Train and Equip" project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the U.S. Army has learned recently. Now here's the joke. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in northeast Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in D.C., that they thought they could take on anybody. What they're in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry counterinsurgency force like the one we gave them isn't much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military's response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokesperson called Russia's response "disproportionate." What the hell are they talking about? They've been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of "minimum necessary force," not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it's a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you've got it, you use it.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what "disproportionate" means is -- well, imagine that you're watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ### whipped by a bully, and you say, "That's inappropriate!" I mean, instead of actually helping him. That's what "disproportionate" means from the Pentagon: "We're not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we're with you in spirit, little buddy!"

The quickest way to see who's winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, "To fight Russia by ourselves is insane." Which means they thought Russia wouldn't back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies -- but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, just 10 years earlier without helping. That's the thing: The bastards are unpredictable. You can't even count on them to betray their friends (though it's the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the United States is all tied up in that ####### Iraq War; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It's #######-for-tat time, with Kosovo as the ####### and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naive, idiotic allies like Georgia. It's a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it's the fact that the United States is weaker than it was 10 years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn't matter that much. I'm just being honest here. In a year, nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What's more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

Even so, the great Russian-Ossetian land grab will make great material for another few centuries of gloating, ballads, blood oaths, revenge and counter-grabs. In this part of the world, there's always something to avenge.

This is an adapted version of an essay by Brecher that appeared on eXiled online.

War Nerd by Gary Brecher (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work on eXiled online.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/94706/georg...2C_loses_badly/

[alienlovechild 75]

You think bold is annoying?

Are you compensating for your small, um, . . .font?

Some of these clowns enjoy the death and destruction of war. Don't you see the humor, too?

Edited August 12, 2008 by alienlovechild