The Russian sack of Georgia continues as the world stands by helpless:
POTI, Georgia (AP) – Russian forces blocked the only land entrance to Georgia’s main port city on Thursday, a day before Russia promised to complete a troop pullout from its ex-Soviet neighbor.
Armored personnel carriers and troop trucks blocked the bridge to the Black Sea port city of Poti, and Russian forces excavated trenches and set up mortars facing the city. Another group of APCs and trucks were positioned in a nearby wooded area.
Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has promised that his forces would pull back by Friday, Russian troops appear to be digging in, raising concern about whether Moscow is aiming for a lengthy occupation of its small, pro-Western neighbor.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili told The Associated Press that Russia was thinning out its presence in some occupied towns but was seizing other strategic spots. He called the Russian moves “some kind of deception game.”
“(The Russians) are making fun of the world,” he declared.
An EU-sponsored cease-fire says both Russian and Georgian forces must move back to positions they held before fighting broke out Aug. 7 in Georgia’s separatist republic of South Ossetia, which has close ties to Russia. The agreement also says Russian forces can work in a so-called “security zone” that extends more than four miles into Georgia from South Ossetia.
Poti is at least 95 miles west of the nearest point in South Ossetia.
This is clearly an attempt to stop humanitarian aid from flowing into the Georgian territory. We’ve bombed warlords in Africa for acting the same way. But as Gabriel Schoenfeld puts forward in this essay America’s good faith efforts to denuclearize our military keeps us from dealing with Russia effectively:
Under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which went into force in 1994, both the U.S. and the USSR made radical cuts in their strategic nuclear arsenals — that is, in weapons of intercontinental range. The 2002 Moscow Treaty pushed the numbers down even further, until each side’s strategic nuclear umbrella was pocket-size.
Yet matters are very different at the tactical, or short-range, level. Here, the U.S., acting unilaterally and with virtually no fanfare, sharply cut back its stockpile of nonstrategic nuclear warheads. As far back as 1991, the U.S. began to retire all of its nuclear warheads for short-range ballistic missiles, artillery and antisubmarine warfare. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, not one of these weapons exists today. The same authoritative publication estimates that the number of tactical warheads in the U.S. arsenal has dwindled from thousands to approximately 500.
Russia has also reduced the size of its tactical nuclear arsenal, but starting from much higher levels and at a slower pace, leaving it with an estimated 5,000 such devices — 10 times the number of tactical weapons held by the U.S. Such a disparity would be one thing if we were contending with a stable, postcommunist regime moving in the direction of democracy and integration with the West. That was the Russia we anticipated when we began our nuclear build-down. But it is not the Russia we are facing today.
Not only has Russia retained a sizable nuclear arsenal, its military and political leaders regularly engage in aggressive bluster about expanded deployment and possible use, and sometimes they go beyond bluster. Six months ago, Russia began sending cruise missile-capable Bear H bombers on sallies along the coast of Alaska.
Ex-K.G.B . leader Putin is using cold war calculus to expose our relative weakness in dealing with his regime, noting that he could send ten nukes into America for every one we send to Russia even if we had the will to do so, which I would argue we don’t. More importantly Russia’s military, though less professional and technically advanced, has proven that the sledge hammer tactics of the Soviet Union is not only still viable, but a perfect counter to America’s “agile” specialized forces. We cannot stop a full on Russian onslaught with the anti-terrorism model of our military and Putin knows it.
The Russian show of force has helped push oil prices back up and is eliminating the recent gains the dollar has made. Putin no doubt knows the tensions he’s causing will hurt our economy and is willing to push this to the limit to squeeze every last drop of blood from America.