Jon Sawyer, the director for the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting, said US politicians had encouraged their Georgian counterparts to think they had the backing of the US when Tbilisi decided to launch its attack on South Ossetia last week.

"The US has for several years now mishandled the situation in Georgia," he told Al Jazeera.

"The way that Mikheil Saakashvili has approached this [has been by] thinking that he could be an extension of the west, a partner of the United States."

"In many ways we have given him cause for thinking that, with the many visits to the United States, the talk of Georgia as a beacon for democracy."

Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that US encouragement may have made Saakashvili "miscalculate" and send Georgian troops into South Ossetia.

"I think in many respects Saakashvili got too close to the United States and the United States got too close to Saakashvili," Kupchan told the Reuters news agency.

"It made him overreach, it made him feel at the end of the day that the West would come to his assistance if he got into trouble."

The statistics seem to back the view that Tbilisi felt itself under the protective wing of the Bush administration.

US and Georgian leaders have forged a close relationship
As well as diplomatic encouragement, Saakashvili's government was offered both economic and military aid by Washington.

US special forces trained Georgian troops in 2002 to combat Chechen fighters in the Pankisi Gorge, which borders Chechnya, as part of the US "war on terror".

And Georgian forces continued to recieve training from the US as they prepared to send troops to Iraq, following the US-led invasion in 2003.

Washington gave $151 million to the Georgian government in security aid between 2004 and 2006.

Hoewel Georgië 2000 manschappen beschikbaar stelde voor de oorlog in Irak, laat de VS ze nu keihard vallen. Het enige dat ze hebben gedaan is deze troepen repatriëren.

is het leuk zo'n monoloog?

hahahaha

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...

Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its "national interest," the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone's interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region.

probeer je nou jezelf te overtuigen van je eigen gelijk @sam cash?

A Path to Peace in the Caucasus
By Mikhail Gorbachev
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; Page A13

MOSCOW -- The past week's events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.