The South Caucasus is the land route from Europe to Asia in the east and to Iran and its neighbors - Iraq, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan - to the south.
It is at the center of a strategy that alone ties together the three major wars of the past decade - Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) - and that aims at preventing regional economic, security and infrastructural development cooperation between Russia, Iran, China, India and Turkey in the same Balkans-to-Asia Silk Route area.
As it was insightfully described by a Pakistani analyst recently, the current century is witnessing the final act in a drama that could be called the West versus the rest. The South Caucasus is the linchpin and the battleground of this geopolitical and historical denouement.
Yesterday the American warship the USS Klakring, docked in the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi (capital of Ajaria, subjugated in 2004 by the US-formed new Georgian army), welcomed aboard former US-based President Mikheil Saakashvili to him "a chance to visit with the crew and discuss the importance of a strong United States-Georgia relationship."
The Klakring was "hosting visits and participating in theater
security cooperation activities which develop both nations' abilities to operate against common threats...."
(1)
What "common threat" was meant is not hard to discern. Its capital is Moscow.
The Georgian Defense Minister appointed to that role after last August's war with Russia, David Sikharulidze, said on the occasion that the arrival of the US warship - fresh from taunting Russia with a visit to Sevastopol where the Russian Black Sea Fleet is based - represented "a guarantee for stability in the NATO space."
(2)
Sikharulidze let a cat out of a bag that the Pentagon and the White House would have preferred remain there. The two latter hide their military expansion into the Black Sea and the Caucasus under the masks of "guaranteeing maritime security" and "protecting a new democracy from its hostile northern neighbor," but in fact Georgia is NATO's beachhead and bridge for penetration of a tri-continental expanse of territory the West has set its sights on.
The Georgian Defense Minister was well-groomed for his current role. Prior to being appointed to his post last December Sikharulidze attended advance courses at the US Navy's Justice School, the NATO SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) School at Oberammergau, and the NATO Defense College.
In a news column he wrote for a Georgian newspaper in early March Sikharulidze asserted "We will develop well-equipped, properly trained and rapidly deployable forces to defend Georgia and to meet our international obligations. Our capabilities and tactics will be designed to meet a considerably superior force."
The considerably superior force in question doesn't need to be named.
To assist Georgia in preparing for a - larger, more decisive - showdown with Russia, he said, "To enhance this effort, we look forward to the arrival of an expert team from NATO's Allied Command Transformation."
Just as importantly, he added that "as NATO seeks alternative routes to Afghanistan, we understand our strategic responsibility as gateway to the East-West corridor. Georgia will provide logistical support to NATO, opening its territory, ports, airfields, roads and railroads to the alliance."
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Georgia's appointed role in providing the US and NATO with land, sea and air routes for the dangerously expanding war in South Asia will be taken up in more detail later. As to its defense minister's allusion to NATO's Norfolk, Virginia-based Allied Command Transformation (ACT) being tasked to assist the Pentagon in preparing the nation's armed forces for a confrontation with a "considerably superior force," on the very day Sikharulidze's article appeared, the Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command and Supreme Allied Commander Transformation for NATO, Gen. James Mattis, met with him and his commander in chief Saakashvili to plot "prospects for Georgia's stronger cooperation with NATO" shortly after the release of a "document entitled The Defence Minister's Vision 2009 that was made public on February 17 [and which stated that] one of the defence ministry's priorities is to 'adjust the Georgian armed forces with NATO standards.'"
(4)
The day before the release of the Defence Minister's Vision 2009, the Georgian defense chief welcomed the NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia Robert Simmons to "discuss" it. Whether Simmons bothered to have the document translated into Georgian beforehand was not mentioned.
Simmons also briefed Sikharulidze on the Annual National Program NATO had bestowed on Georgia on December 2, 2009 (a parallel arrangement was made with Ukraine), less than three months after Georgia's attack on South Ossetia and war with Russia and following the launching of the NATO-Georgia Commission on September 15, barely a month after the war ended. (Washington signed a US-Georgia Charter on Strategic Partnership on January 9, 2009.)
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