We have had no access to the net, and we haven’t read the papers much, since we got her to VT. A couple of days ago we gathered from the front page of a newspaper that Bush was planning on sending troops to Georgia. It seems we have critical interests there, as we do in every godforsaken corner of the earth. I find today that my alarm was premature, since idiot that he is, it never occurred to Bush that even the president of the United States doesn’t control everything.
President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.
As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn’t cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.
Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.
“The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank,” said a senior administration official.
Still, Bush’s eagerness to confront the Russians, sans Congressional input, is deserving of yet another impeachment count. Putting our people there is, if not tantamount to a declaration of war, a deliberate provocation designed to start one.
I remember that Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war. By some accounts, part of the plan consisted of trying to convince the Vietnamese that he was so crazy he would use nuclear weapons against them. It didn’t work, probably because they concluded he was not that crazy. If Bush succeeds in sending military personnel to Georgia, we can only hope that the Russians will conclude, as so many Americans have, that he really is that crazy.
I haven’t had the benefit of the much access to news, so I don’t know how this threat of his is being perceived. I suspect that there is more than a bit of presidential politics involved. Apparently, John McCain has interjected himself into the process in an unseemly fashion.
These people will do anything to win, and that includes inciting a war with Russia.
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