by Bernard Schaer

When President Reagan challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall…”, he did not say “…so we may divide and conquer…”. He might as well have. US foreign policy has been doing just that ever since the Berlin wall came down in 1989.

Since Boris Yeltsin effectively disposed of the USSR, many of its former republics became independent countries. The US has been very successful in picking off former Soviet Union member countries one by one, “spreading democracy”, opening up markets to American and American-friendly countries’ corporations and securing resources or should I say protecting “American interests”. Georgia is just one of those cases. The entire oil and natural gas rich Caspian Sea basin has been of particular interest to the US.

South Ossetia, which has a majority of ethnic Russians declared its independence from Georgia in early 1992. Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze (remember him? former USSR Foreign Minister under Gorbachev), tried unsuccessfully to force South Ossetia back under Georgian rule. After heavy fighting, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin and President Shevardnadze signed a peace agreement between South Ossetia and Georgia on July 14, 1992, placing peacekeeping troops from Russia, North Ossetia, and South Ossetia along the demarcation line to Georgia. Based on this agreement South Ossetia has not been part of Georgia since 1992.

During the “Rose Revolution” in November of 2003, Shevardnadze was forced from power and in January 2004, the US-educated 35-year-old Mikhail Saakashvili was elected president. With a US-friendly government in place, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a pipeline Washington had been lobbying for for more than ten years, was finally a step closer to reality. The first oil that was pumped from the Baku end of the pipeline on May 10, 2005 reached Ceyhan/Turkey on May 28, 2006.

During the night of August 7-8, Georgian troops attacked the capital of South Ossetia, prompting a perhaps unexpectedly forceful response from Russia. It is interesting to note that the US intelligence services were supposedly unaware of Russian troop movements prior to the Georgian attack – if there were any. Either our various agencies are asleep at the wheel or the matter was kept quiet in anticipation of how the Russians might react to a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. A trial balloon perhaps that thousands paid for with their lives.

Georgia and other former Soviet republics located in the Caspian Sea basin are of vital interest to the profit laden US oil conglomerates. The fight for South Ossetia’s independence would appear to be a Russian/US standoff by proxy. Or Saakashvili was simply delusional in thinking the US would actually back him, risking a direct Russian/US engagement.