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U.S. Hands Off Georgia and Russia – END NATO NOW!

TELL BUSH, CHENEY, RICE AND CONGRESS: U.S. HANDS OFF GEORGIA AND RUSSIA – NO NEW WAR – END NATO NOW!

It is with growing concern that we observe that the U.S. government is threatening new military moves that carry the danger of another war-this time against Russia.

The Bush regime and the corporate U.S. news media have launched an anti-Russia hate campaign. Yet just as with the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the threats on Iran, the threatened military confrontation with Russia is also based on a lie.

The truth, hidden by most of the corporate news media, is that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili, unleashed his U.S.- and Israeli-armed and-trained forces on the tiny autonomous region of South Ossetia, murdering civilians and attacking Russian peacekeeping troops stationed there. Only then did Russian troops respond.

Saakashvili is the president who sent 2,000 Georgian youth to join the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. The U.S. supplies the weapons to his army. U.S. Special Forces and Israeli advisers and mercenary contractors direct the Georgian military, which just held three weeks of joint exercises with the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in July. We must take note that like Iraq and Iran, Georgia itself is a prize for U.S. oil companies, as it is a major transit point for Central Asian oil.

There is little doubt that U.S. arming of Georgia and its push to get Georgia into NATO set the scene for the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia and created the threat of a new major war. Now Washington also threatens Russia by placing missile bases  in Poland and the Czech Republic against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people there. Surrounding Russia with this military alliance of new NATO members is the greatest danger to peace and stability on a global scale.

It is time to remember that NATO was established as an anti-USSR military alliance aimed at reinforcing capitalist control and preventing socialist revolutions in the colonialist powers of Europe weakened by World War II. Since the end of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. has attempted to vastly expand NATO and turn it into a military instrument to consolidate U.S. corporate power, surround Russia and China and re-conquer the former colonial world.

Consider these examples:

Yugoslavia. Based on the lie that NATO was defending small nations, U.S.-NATO intervention and bombing destroyed multinational Yugoslavia and turned the Balkans into a collection of dependent ministates ruled by the U.S. and Western Europe powers.

Afghanistan. Based on the lie that this was a police action against terrorists, U.S.-NATO have carried out a seven-year occupation leaving the country in ruins and enslaved.

Iraq. Here the lie about weapons of mass destruction was so blatant, and the U.S. position so weak, that most NATO countries refused to join the occupation and utter destruction of Iraq.

No one can believe Bush is promoting peace in Georgia. It is time not only to stop this expansion but to end the NATO war machine completely by dissolving NATO.

It is encouraging to anti-war people worldwide that Georgians themselves have issued a statement condemning the Saakashvili machine. “The entire responsibility for this fratricidal war,” the Georgian Peace Committee says, “for thousands of children, women and elderly dead people, for the inhabitants of South Ossetia and of Georgia falls exclusively on the current president, on the Parliament and on the government of Georgia.” (Aug. 11)

We cannot do less than the people of Georgia who oppose the current president and want no part of NATO. We demand from Washington:

(1) Stop interfering in Georgia and the Caucasus

(2) Stop attempting to expand the NATO military organization into the countries of Eastern Europe and those that border on Russia.

(3) End the aggressive NATO military alliance

(4) No new wars!

Sign the Petition at http://www.iacenter.org/anti-war/handsoffcaucasus