It's a Brit blog with well thought out posts. This post on the "hidden" casus belli ...oil. Or control of how it's transported:
Lead paragraphs:
It's odd, when the US lead force invaded Iraq to rid the Country of Saddam Hussein the BBC was awash with "experts" and pundits explaining how this is all about oil. Yet when the Russians invade Georgia the word "oil" is not heard. Yet this invasion really is about oil.
In case you are not aware, Georgian oil can flow out of that country in two ways, either through Turkey and hence into Europe or through Russia. Putin wants to ensure that as much of the world's oil as possible flows through Russia's pipelines so he can have as much bargaining power and control over Europe's power supply. The Georgians know that their independence relies as much as anything on the continued use of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a pipeline that connects the Caspian Sea's oilfields to Baku, then to Tbilisi and finally onto the Haydar Aliyev oil Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
As I posted earlier, I see a harmonic of Nazi justifications for the Sudetenland invasion. "Not a goat" does me one better... He see similarities in the reactions to Russia's aggression:
I heard someone on Radio 4's Question Time last night saying that this invasion was all the West's fault (especially the Americans) for being so triumphalist at the ending of the Cold War and by humiliating Russia. These are very similar to the excuses that were made in the early 1930s for Nazi Germany; Germany was humiliated after the First World War by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and so it is understandable that they want to assert themselves and invade Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia etc.
As the saying in the blogosphere goes, "Read the whole thing"....
