The Grand Empire Chessboard

"It's all going to hell,''
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili

This Russian-Georgian war that is presently being fought is actually part of a Grand Chess Game being played out right in front of your eyes. The players are making strategic moves to grow or to try to offset America's corporatist global empire. Sure Georgia wants S. Ossetia and S. Ossetia wants to be independent. But in order to really understand what the war is about we need to go back in history and read what Barack Obama's key international adviser has to say about America's empire and where the empire game needs to be played.

But first some news on the Russian-Georgian war and a little background.

Georgia, the homeland of Stalin and once part of the Soviet Union, attacked its breakaway province of S. Ossetia. Russia, declaring the region independent, responded with massive force attacking Georgia. Now Abkhazia, another Georgia breakaway zone, has declared war on Georgia today. The latest news as of this writing is that Georgia, pleading for American help, has declared a cease fire and has withdrawn from S. Ossetia

Russian jets, after the Russian-Georgian war started, bombed the (BTC) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. which starts from the oil fields of the Caspian Sea in Azerbeijan and in part runs about 60 miles south of S. Osetia and continues onto Turkey and the Mediterranean Sea where it is shipped to an energy hungry West. All of this you will note bypasses Russia. This pipeline carries 1% of the world's oil supply and it is an essential part of a future strategy for the Western world to gain access to oil from Central Asia, in which the reserves are estimated to be one of the largest in the world. Nearly 70% of the pipeline was funded by the World Bank.

Georgia is working to become a member of NATO and it has shown its good faith by supplying the 3rd largest army in Iraq, behind the United States and Great Britain. But with the start of the Russian-Georgian war the Georgians have had to take those troops home.

So this is the way the war seems to have gone so far.

But wars don't just arise out of nothing. Instead this war has its roots in the fall of the Soviet Union and America's position as the last empire standing. You probably weren't surprised to learn that oil fuels the conflict but the real issue is global supremacy and the future of the American empire.

So why doesn't Russia just leave poor Georgia alone and let it control S. Ossetia?

Well it is a Grand Game and in order to really understand what is going on we have to go back to 1997 and take a look at Zbigniew Brezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard"
Brezinski is the key International Adviser to Barak Obama. He was the former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter (1977-81), Trustee and founder of the Trilateral Commission, One of Kissinger's boys, and international advisor of several major US/Global corporations.

Here is what Brezinski writes in his book:

.....“The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea...." (p.125)

".....But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold...." (p.124)

".....It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it...." (p148)

"....Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them;... second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above..." (p. 40)

"...To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together...." (p.40)