AUG. 20, 2008 --(LPAC)--The Pentagon is resisting White House schemes to deploy U.S. military forces into the Caucasus and the Black Sea in order to send a sharp political rebuke to Russia, over the Georgia crisis. According to U.S. intelligence sources, and an interview with a Pentagon official, published by the McClatchy News Service, the U.S. military is opposed to deploying a U.S. Navy hospital ship to the Black Sea, arguing that the daily U.S. airlifts of humanitarian aid are sufficient, according to U.S. monitors on the ground inside Georgia. The U.S. Marine Corp, according to the same Pentagon source, is pushing for the remaining 17 Marine trainers to be withdrawn from Georgia, but the White House has refused the request. The trainers are there preparing Georgian troops for deployment to Iraq.

The fight between the Pentagon and the White House runs deeper. At the Aug. 19 Atlantic Council event, featuring the speaker of the Georgia parliament (by closed circuit link from Tbilisi), a clear split emerged between two former senior State Department officials, Thomas Pickering and Nick Burns. Burns presented a hard-line support for Georgia, including expedited processing of Georgia's application for NATO membership, and other direct provocations to Russia. Pickering, in both his opening remarks and in reply to questions from the audience, argued that the U.S.-Russian partnership had to be considered primary, despite the crisis in Russian-American relations over the Georgia actions in South Ossetia. Pickering acknowledged that the European and U.S. backing for the Kosovo declaration of independence from Serbia was a critical background factor, and argued that the long-term American-Russian relationship was of top strategic significance. In general, the audience of diplomats, retired military officers and think tankers was clearly divided over the issue of how to respond to the events in the Caucasus, with one retired Air Force general pressing the Georgian officials over whether they had informed the U.S. embassy or any NATO officials about their plans to assault South Ossetia, before the shelling began.