Ken Timmerman has it exactly right in this NewsMax.com article about what Putin’s KGB thugocracy is doing in the ‘great game’ of the 21st Century by attacking Georgia and its strategic Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Witness these comments:
Sources in Tehran with close ties to senior regime officials tell me that Iran’s leaders are “looking and laughing” at the slaughter in Georgia, because they feel they will benefit from the closure of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, as well as from Russia’s Cold-War style confrontation with the West.
Iran derived an added, and possibly unsuspected, benefit from the recent fighting when Georgian president Saakashvili ordered the 2000 Georgian troops on duty with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq to return home to guard their nation’s capital.
“The Georgian soldiers had been guarding Iran’s border with Iraq,” my sources in Tehran say. “This will put new pressure on the United States and Iraq, and in the meantime make it easier for the people who want to cross the border from Iran” to carry out terrorist attacks against the U.S. and our Iraqi allies.
The timing of the current conflict in Georgia has not been lost on Iran’s leaders. “They are convinced that Russia will not help the United States at the U.N. Security Council in getting a new sanctions resolution,” my sources say.
The Putin Georgia attack is also aimed at Israel, a potential partner in the BTC pipeline deal. Israel was to get oil for local energy use and to transship via a pipeline from Ashdod to Eilat and hence to tankers plying the Asian oil trades. Looks like the Russians and the Iranian Islamic Republic are in cahoots on this caper in Georgia So, why are the corrupt Olmert and the Bushites dithering, when these are the geo - political realities of the energy ‘great game’, eh?
by Kenneth Timmerman, NewsMax.com, August 14, 2008
A senior White House official confirmed on Monday what reporters on the ground in Georgia have known since their first glimpse of the ongoing hostilities: Russia’s invasion of Georgia was not a hastily-improvised event, in response to provocation, but had been planned well in advance.
Russia moved the equivalent of two heavy divisions into the mountainous terrain of northern Georgia, in addition to mobilizing its navy to blockade the Georgian coast and its air force to launch hundreds of bombing raids. These are not the type of things any modern nation can do overnight. Russia’s planning shows foresight, and intent.
So besides reasserting Russia’s control over its “near abroad,” and opposing the expansion of NATO into Georgia, what is czar Vladimir Putin’s game?
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has accused Russia of seeking to control energy routes from the Caspian. Georgian officials have told reporters that Russian aircraft have bombed portions of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil and gas pipeline dozens of times since hostilities began. Russia has denied the attacks. So has pipeline operator, British Petroleum.
But a reporter from the London Daily Telegraph witnessed the damage from one Russian air strike over the weekend, during which “over 50 missiles” were fired against a stretch of the pipeline on the outskirts of Tbilisi.
“I have no doubt they wanted to target the pipeline, there is nothing else here,” a policeman who witnessed the attack told The Telegraph’s reporter.
Why would the Russians attempt to take out the recently-built pipeline, which carries energy resources from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to Western Europe?
Because the Russians and their strategic partner, the Islamic Republic of Iran, have been opposed to the pipeline since it was first planned in the mid-1990s. Through terrorist proxies in Turkey, where the pipeline feeds into the Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean, they have repeatedly sabotaged it....
