Cyde Weys Musings

It’s looking like Georgia made the fatal mistake of trusting us, the United States, in military manners, and now they’re paying the price for it. But first, some back story.

George W. Bush is (or was until these past few days, anyway) very popular in Georgia. It’s one of the few countries he’s been on an overseas trip to in recent years where he was greeted with revelry instead of massive protests. And there’s a good reason for it: this administration has been intensely supportive of Georgia, though the way in which it was supportive is now proving to have been ultimately destructive. We’ve given Georgia hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, ostensibly to help them crack down on Islamic terrorism, but it was really about arming yet another break-away Soviet republic as a participant in a long series of proxy wars with Russia.

In response for all of our aid and hawkish military advice, Georgia sent many troops to fight our war of folly in Iraq. They have (or had, since they’re withdrawing to their own country now) the third largest contingent in Iraq, behind the United States and the United Kingdom. For a country of fewer than 5 million people, that’s quite the feat. So we’ve been hyping them up militarily for years now, teaching them that acting like we do (launching preemptive wars and such) is the proper way to conduct business. They missed an important distinction, though: unlike the United States, they don’t have the most powerful military in the world, so they can’t pull it off like we can. And they were fooled into thinking we would come to their aid if Russia ever did respond to their provocations. Essentially, they proved to be Bush’s pawn, discarded at the drop of a hat. It’s no wonder they feel betrayed.

This Russo-Georgian war is yet another disastrous result of George W. Bush’s terrible foreign policies. After the reckless manner in which the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were waged, you’d hope there wouldn’t be any country out there stupid enough to follow our lead on military matters, yet Georgia did, and is now paying the price. Hopefully when Obama is elected we can begin to sort out this mess and have a foreign policy that isn’t so fond of encouraging foolhardy hawkish militarism.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 23:35 and is filed under Politics. Keywords: Tags: foreign policy, George W. Bush, Georgia, Politics, Russia, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.