Tag: Georgia (Country)

I have to say I’m getting more and more jittery about the global situation. This story from Iraq is just one story – but if the Shiite government really does want to get America out of the way and is now targeting key members of the Sunni Awakening movement, the current lull in violence may well be just a pause before another bout of brutal civil war ahead. In the world as a whole, no progress has been made in restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions; no breakthrough has occurred between Israel and Syria; and Russia’s invasion of Georgia is a clear sign from Moscow that it is an independent player in this global system, and has many cards to play against the West if it so chooses. Among those cards is a de facto alliance with Iran. And this axis also makes it likelier that Israel will seek to pre-emptively attack Iran in ways that would instantly throw the world into a global conflict, with religious overtones.

Am I being excitable again? Perhaps. But sober minds should take a moment to read Paul Berman’s latest piece in TNR. It’s very shrewd on a variety of points, not least of which is the Russian leadership’s obvious, and dangerous, sense of their own vulnerability. But what Paul really grasps is that the post-1989 era may really be over. He worries that a more traditionally realist conservative foreign policy will now gain ascendancy – to the detriment of democratic movements in the Russian orbit, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He may be right. But the truth is: the time for such an adjustment is surely overdue.

The United States is fast becoming a fiscal basket-case, its currency vastly depreciated from a few years ago, its debt mounting, with neither presidential candidate willing to tackle it. The Bush Republicans have added $32 trillion to future liabilities, and hollowed out the military with a counter-insurgency of attrition in Mesopotamia. The war in Iraq, a strategic disaster, has soaked up trillions without making the West in any measurable way safer. Al Qaeda has a far more secure base in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani nuclear Islamic state could turn any minute. The global economy seems headed for a serious downturn, with US private and public indebtedness making a quick revival unlikely. The hubris that propelled this president to begin his second term vowing to end tyranny on the planet by force of American arms now looks ludicrous.

My fear is that we have lost the window for recalibrating means to ends without simply looking as weak as we are. Iran’s tenacity, and Russia’s aggression are simply reflections of the broader recognition that Bush’s bluff has been called. McCain’s appeal is that he simply refuses to believe in any of this: it’s all still winnable, and American military power is still his main tool of choice. But what if he’s wrong? Would he not merely compound the folly of the last few years – and would he be the wisest choice as president in a world hurtling toward the potential for more polarizing conflict?

There is one obvious area of common ground, however. Oil is the source of the power of our enemies, and the enemies of democracy and peace. Until we shift the global economy decisively away from petro-economics, the West will decline quite swiftly in relation to the petro-powers. There is no peaceful future for a world run on oil. This is now not just a matter of environmental concern; it’s a geo-strategic urgency.

A reader writes:

Your reader couldn’t be more wrong. When Russian dissidents and democracy advocates gathered bravely in the late sixties and early seventies, frequently led by Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov, they had a favorite place–before the statue of Pushkin on Pushkin Square in central Moscow.  They would stand quiet vigil before the great poet, and read some lines of his poetry gathering strength and resolve from it, and remembering that the Russia that crushed freedom in Prague and trampled demonstrators in Vilnius, Baku and Tbilisi was not the only Russia.  There was a richer tradition and vision to be safeguarded.

Pushkin, who was descended from a dark-skinned servant of Peter the Great and was proud of his exotic part-African heritage, is the greatest of Russia’s poets and he presents the most noble vision of what it means to be Russian–a generosity of spirit, graciousness and liberality in dealing with foreigners that reflects the very antithesis of the soul-less KGB man now at the nation’s helm. He shared the Romanticist fascination with the Caucasus, and no Georgian would ever resent his voice being heard at a time like this one. There is a wonderful poetic tradition in Georgia, but not much of it in English translation. Though Boris Pasternak translated a great deal of it into Russian. Chavchavadze is the winner from the Pushkin era, I think.

A reader writes:

Sadly, you quote Pushkin to express Georgian suffering.  This is like having an abuser speak for the pain of the abused.

Both he and Lermontov wrote romantically of the people of the Caucasus at the time of the Russian conquests of this area.

And true, the czarist empire did save them from Persian and Turkish slaughter. But the Russians imposed their own empire and even simple things like ancient Georgian religious chants were pushed aside in favor of Russian music until the 1990’s. Pushkin wrote of the conquest of the Chechens, a particularly horrid war, where the dense forests that used to cover much of the land were hacked down tree by tree to deny the Chechens cover, an ecological disaster they have not recovered from. He celebrates these conquests, and Russians often quote him to express their love for that area. But the conquered see it totally differently.

And did not these Chechens try to separate from Russia, just as the Ossetians and Abhaz now claim from Georgia, just a few years ago and were met by bombings worse than WW2 ? And this was met by silence from the world. Interestingly Shevchenko, the Ukrainian national poet, persecuted by the Czars, wrote from the viewpoint of the Chechens. So would it not have been better to quote a Georgian poet  to express Georgian misery at the hands of Russia?

Probably, yes. But the Pushkin was beautiful.

How soon we forget that Putin wrote his grad school thesis on the strategic importance of Russia’s energy resources. Yes, as Tom Friedman points out, the Georgia mess is in part due to Western over-reach and Saakashvili’s hubris, but at its center is the Russian state trying to play the big card it still has:

No one quite believed in the mid-1990s that Western oil companies could pump Caspian crude across two war-torn republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, to a quiet bay on the Mediterranean, and that they would do it without so much as a by-your-leave to the two regional superpowers, Iran and Russia.

But before a bomb (probably not Russian) put out part of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline some two weeks ago, it was carrying 40-45 million tons per year to the international market. Another line is feeding Caspian gas across Georgia to Turkish consumers. And Russia can do nothing.

Only last month it looked like Russian resistance to improving pipeline capacity across its territory would force Kazakhstan to increase its trans-Caspian tanker-born oil transport. Meanwhile, the transport of Azeri (and possibly Kazakh) oil through Georgia and Turkey ran counter to all Russian aims.

This is because Russia can exercise no political control and get no share of the profits.

It’s one of the least noticed of the effects of Russia’s new aggression, but it may be one of the most important. The project for a unified European Union was riven by the Iraq war and is now divided by Putin’s policework in his near-abroad. Art Goldhammer sees it:

Forget the Irish "no." Forget the Constitutional Treaty and its mini-treaty reincarnation. The real threat to Europe has become glaringly apparent with the awakening of the hibernating Russian bear. The visceral reaction of the former East Bloc countries is–comprehensibly enough–different from the reaction in Western Europe… The Georgia crisis will abate, but the Russia problem will remain. Europe has no solution to it, and the United States seems happy to keep it unresolved, indeed to work assiduously to widen the fissures in the European Union.”

It’s "Old Europe" vs "New Europe" (Plus Britain) again. Fistful of Euros coins a neologism to describe it:

Russia has Ledeenised the situation.

Some encouraging signs of free inquiry. I haven’t written on this for a bit, as the domestic campaign has taken off. I still don’t support including Georgia in NATO; and believe handling Russia requires more than pretending that the Soviet Union still exists. But there’s little doubt, it seems to me, that Putin has just sent a chilling signal about the resurgence of Russia and its revived ambitions in its near abroad. And it underlines the point that until the global economy finds a different form of energy, the petro-powers are going to be able to dictate a lot of things in the next couple of decades.

If you didn’t think that a pastor has any business being the first to interview two presidential candidates in his church, you’ll be even more alarmed that Saakashvili was apparently on the phone with Warren yesterday. And he relayed this information on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Yes, we need much more religion in politics, don’t we? The secularism is suffocating.

A reader writes:

You were right about the fact that this conflict exposes, as no others have, the chasm between the formerly united cold war warriors in this country.

True conservatives/realists recognize that the US has little national interests in Georgia and even less in going out of our way to piss off the Russian bear. Georgia is a poor, isolated, backwater country that has throughout modern history been within Russia’s sphere of influence, much as the Caribbean and Central American nations have been within America’s sphere of influence. Moreover, even if things were different on that score, there nothing we can effectively do to coerce Russia to act differently.  The realist recognizes this as a windmill at which we should not attempt to tilt. 

But the romantic Wilsonian interventionists (i.e., unchastened neocons) believe we should take on any burden and any cause that appeals to our sense of democratic morality irrespective of how costly and how damaging such rhetoric and actions may be.  U.S. foreign policy is in desperate need of a dose of realism and restraint.  We are not a hegemonic empire, we are at heart a commercially based power whose ultimate demise will come not from challenges from Russia or China but from our own overreaching. 

While I loathe the prospects of Obama’s left-wing economic prescriptions and what they may entail for the country, I do find comfort in the idea that he would actually exercise much more restraint and rectitude in our foreign policies.   

Men cry during the funeral of an Abkhaz soldier who was killed in the remote Kodori Gorge town of Ghvada while demining a bomb after an armed clash with Georgians, in Sukhumi on August 16, 2008. By Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty.