Tag Archives: Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict

‘Like Horse-Mounted Cavalry Against Tanks’, by Scott Ritter

The future of warfare will involve drones, and Turkey has some of the world’s best. From Scott Ritter at RT News via lewrockwell.com:

From Syria to Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh, this new method of military offense has been brutally effective. We are witnessing a revolution in the history of warfare, one that is causing panic, particularly in Europe.

In an analysis written for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow, argues that the extensive (and successful) use of military drones by Azerbaijan in its recent conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh holds “distinct lessons for how well Europe can defend itself.” 

Gressel warns that Europe would be doing itself a disservice if it simply dismissed the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting as “a minor war between poor countries.” In this, Gressel is correct – the military defeat inflicted on Armenia by Azerbaijan was not a fluke, but rather a manifestation of the perfection of the art of drone warfare by Baku’s major ally in the fighting, Turkey. Gressel’s conclusion – that “most of the [European Union’s] armies… would do as miserably as the Armenian Army” when faced by such a threat – is spot on.

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Nagorno-Karabakh is Tragic but Not America’s Problem, by Doug Bandow

The search continues for the one square inch of real estate on the planet on which no Washington war monger cannot detect an American “interest.” Unfortunately, it’s not Nagorno-Karabakh. From Doug Bandow at antiwar.com:

In Washington foreign conflicts are to policymakers what lights are to moths. The desire to take the U.S. into every political dispute, social collapse, civil war, foreign conflict, and full-scale war seems to only get stronger as America’s failures accumulate.

There may be no better example than the battle between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the latter’s claim to the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, contained within Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians. Distant from the US and Europe, the struggle matters most to nearby Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

The impact on Americans is minor and indirect at best. Yet there is wailing and gnashing of teeth in Washington that the US is “absent” from this fight. Send in the bombers! Or at least the diplomats! Candidate Joe Biden predictably insisted that America should be leading a peace effort “together with our European partners,” without indicating what that would mean in practice.

The roots of the conflict, like so many others, go back centuries. Control of largely Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia passed among Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution the two were independent and fought over N-K’s status, before both were absorbed by the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population began pressing for transfer to Armenia during the U.S.S.R.’s waning days. After the latter collapsed in 1992 the two newly independent nations again fought, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees, and Armenia grabbed the disputed land as well as even larger adjacent territory filled with ethnic Azerbaijanis.

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Short Armenia vs Azerbaijan war update, by the Saker

The situation is getting both worse and more complicated. From the Saker at thesaker.is:

As was predicted by many, in spite of the agreement signed in Moscow, thing on the ground in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan  have escalated: the Armenians have claimed that Azeri drones have attacked Armenian tactical ballistic missiles on Armenian soil and the Azeris have confirmed this, saying that this was both a warning and a preemptive attack to protect Azeri civilians.

Bottom line is this: Azerbaijan has now officially attacked Armenian soil (as opposed to Karabakh soil) and Armenia now has the right to appeal to the CSTO.  So far, the Armenians have not done so, but now they can and, I believe, probably will do so.

Another interesting development is that the USA has accused Turkey of being involved in this war.  This means that by now all three countries Russia, France and the USA are now declaring that the Turks (and or their “good terrorist” proxies from Syria) are involved.  Aliev is outraged and accused everybody of lying.

Finally, Azeri and Turkish outlets have claimed the Kurds are now fighting on the Armenian side.  However, there have been no verifiable sources for this probably false rumor.

As for the Armenian leader Pashinian, he has accused Aliev of being “Hitler”.

What does all this mean?

Well, for one thing, it was inevitable that the very first ceasefire agreement would be broken.  In such situations, they typically are.

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