Geostrategy and Georgia

From the Center for Research on Globalization, a very interesting read: The Eurasian Corridor: Pipeline Geopolitics and the New Cold War, by Michel Chossudovsky.

It deals with which are the geopolitical stakes at the war of Osetia. Specially on what is the USA trying to secure in that area with the Silk Road Strategy. More than just the Caucasus what is being fought there (and in Afghanistan and probably in Iraq too) is Central Asia, maybe a secondary interest for the USA but a major one for Russia and China, its main rivals.

While Russian oil and gas is theirs, at least by the moment, that is not so clear with regards to Central Asian resources. Additionally all the area affected y the SRS (Urkaine, southern Caucasus and Central Asia) are weak spots for Russia, too tempting to let them fall to the traditional and now renewed geostrategical rival.

All this is splashed of pipelines, geostrategical energy routes built even in the narrow access of Israel to the Red Sea, and the diplomacy and military maneouvres associated with them remind too much to the pre-WWI Baghdad railroad maneouvres, as well as the old imperial tensions between Russia and the, now translated, British Empire in Central Asia too.

By the way, at the same site, you can also find a somewhat different opinion by Ellen Brown, who thinks that the war of Osetia has been engineered to create a smoke curtain to the deep economical crisis. In one thing at least she is right: Saakashvili would not have begun that war, that he could only expect to lose, unless he had orders from Washington D.C.