Tag: Georgia (Country)

Vladimir Cheney

Peter Wehner huffs and puffs over my comparing Russia invading Georgia with the US invading Iraq. Reihan offers a semi-defense while still critiquing my position on Iraq. (Good point on Kosovo, though, and one the Russians are very keenly aware of). And Dean Barnett wants to know where my outrage is. Yep, as my readers have pointed out, I was a little too mad at Bush to express adequate sympathy for the plight of the Georgians at first. I tried to rectify that as graphically as I could. What Putin is doing is repulsive to civilized norms, and longtime readers of this blog will know I have no great love for Putin (unlike Bush, one might add). But yes, my views on the morality of US intervention have changed, as Pete tartly observes, rather "emphatically and dramatically" since 2002. I’ve never disguised this, and in fact, find my own position now somewhat uncomfortable. I’m not used to instinctively suspecting America’s actions in the world. For most of my life, however critical one might have been about America’s occasional mistakes, I never doubted the core moral decency of the US. Or the benefits of benign American hegemony. I grew up deeply aware of this. I remain grateful as a native European for what America has always meant and the sacrifices Americans have often made for the liberty of others.

But I’m chastened now. I’m sorry to say but this administration has done it to me.

I simply cannot pretend that what we’ve learned about them these past few years – and what I’ve learned about the Middle East and wider dimensions of the struggle against Jihadism – hasn’t deeply affected my views. Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army – because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?

The torture regime is the biggest reason I have had to reassess my view of the actions of the United States these past few years. But the case for war is the second. Pete hauls out my own passionate defenses of the case for war as if it’s proof I’m off my rocker. But of course the passion of my advocacy in 2002 – fueled by my continuing hatred of Jihadism in all its forms – is precisely why my anger is now so great. I was deceived and feel terrible responsibility for my naivete. I think there was plenty of good faith in the run-up to the war, among many in the administration and out of it, but I now find it highly probable that there was also a clear and resilient element of bad faith in the office of the vice-president (and he, we now know, has been effectively running the country since 2001). I have come to see, by force of the evidence, that some, if not all, in the Bush administration knew that the WMD case was paper-thin, but pursued the removal of Saddam as a power-play in the Middle East because they wanted the US to become an even greater global power, wanted to secure oil fields, and wanted to do to the Arabs what Putin is now doing to his neighbors: teach them a lesson about raw power. Jonah Goldberg expressed the impulse before the war, in what he called "The Ledeen Doctrine":

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

Viewd in retrospect, if you try and make sense of all the strange decisions the Cheney-Bush administration made, this seems by far the most plausible rationale. When you add to this the deployment of torture and abuse of countless innocent Iraqis as a weapon, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of millions more, the ethnic cleansing the US presided over for years, it does become harder and harder to see the unquestionable moral superiority of the US. Certainly, it seems much more questionable than ever before in my lifetime.

We can argue over the analogies. Yes, Iraq was a wicked dictatorship, and Georgia is a nascent democracy. Yes, the US is not Russia in terms of democratic norms. But actions and context are important. Iraq is thousands of miles away from the US; Georgia is on Russia’s doorstep. The US invaded without the critical second UN resolution, putting the US outside the kind of international legitimacy in a way not totally unlike Russia. There is no American population in Iraq; there is a sizable Russian population in Georgia. Russia is recovering from one of the most precipitous declines in power in world history; the US stood athwart the globe in 2003 with no serious competitors. The Russian intervention has not toppled the Georgian government and has been halted after a few days. The American intervention in Iraq is now in its fifth year, with the administration doing all it can to stay longer.

The point here is not that the invasions are obviously morally equivalent. The point is that the line between American actions in the world and Russia’s are no longer as stark as they once were. Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Americans  – and Georgians – are now living with the consequences. And I’m angry about it.

From Kosovo To Georgia

A reader makes an important point:

It is true that, by their actions in Iraq, Bush and Cheney have ceded any claim to the moral high ground as far as a response to Russia’s involvement in Georgia is concerned, but I think that the difficulty of the US position goes back farther than that — to the policies of NATO expansion in general, and our policies regarding Kosovo in particular, that began with Bush I and Clinton.

Kosovo, like South Ossetia, is a minority province in a state that resulted from the breakup of a communist "confederation" of states.

Its inhabitants, like those of South Ossetia, sought independence. When the armed forces of the "sovereign" country of Serbia took steps to assert control over the breakaway province, NATO stepped in to protect the citizens of Kosovo and restore the peace, largely by trying to obliterate the capacity of the Serbian army to retain the province. NATO’s previous expansion into the Balkans made this possible, because, by the time of that conflict, Kosovo was more in NATO’s backyard/sphere of influence than Russia’s.

But that being the case, how is Georgia’s claim of sovereignty over South Ossetia entitled to any more respect than Serbia’s claim of sovereignty over Kosovo?

Why aren’t the ethnic Russians who form the majority in South Ossetia just as entitled to independence and self-determination as the ethnic Albanians who form the majority in Kosovo?

It should be recalled the Russia has bitterly opposed NATO’s policy with respect to the defense, and now recognition, of Kosovo, and NATO’s expansion into former Soviet Republics.  It should come as no surprise that Russia would invoke the same principles of "peacekeeping" and rights of self determination to protect its turf in the Caucusus and challenge the whole idea of NATO expansion into Georgia.  (Aren’t we glad we don’t have a treaty obligation to defend Georgia now?)

I think the whole issue of NATO expansion, which started in the first Bush administration, has gotten out of hand, and that GWB’s support of Georgia’s inclusion in NATO was foolishly overambitious.  Americans need to be more patient.  In 20 years, most of eastern Europe has become, to an amazing extent, part of the "West."  The former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia aren’t going to be pried away from the Russians quite so easily, or in the same manner.

Dissents Of The Day

Goriurielsinaigetty

A reader writes

I think you are generally correct in your assessment about the situation in Georgia, especially on the point that America plainly lacks the moral authority and credibility to seriously deride the Russian position. But you ended your latest post with a cheap shot.  You say:             

Maybe we should start complaining when as many Georgians have perished as Iraqis – and when Putin throws thousands of innocent Georgians into torture chambers.

I get the point as it concerns the moral and even practical bankruptcy of the Cheney Gang.  But this lingers into territory where I’m not sure you want to be.

I know you don’t want to cast aside the real, existing humanitarian suffering going on in Georgia (both for Georgians and Ossetians, as this superb analysis shows). So why insinuate that said suffering is tangential to the issue, even if it is intentionally over the top to prove a larger geopolitical point?

Instead, we should start complaining immediately when any Georgians have perished at the hands of Putin’s criminal negligence and blatant disregard for human life, whilst at the same time giving not an inch to Bush and Cheney’s own hubris and disregard for human dignity. Of course, America’s past actions have been morally reprehensible on face, with the practical corollary that this makes our current geopolitical leverage vis a vis Russia next to impossible. But Russia is its own agent, and with the profoundly authoritarian Putin (to say nothing of the corrupt and generally incompetent Saakashvili) still controlling Russia’s policies, proper humanitarian outrage remains our most credible weapon, even if its language is sometimes hijacked for the whims of tyrants.

Another is blunter:

That’s a ghastly thing to write. Our own national sins and failures do not excuse Russian violence and aggression, nor do they relieve us of the obligation to condemn or oppose such immoral acts. It is one thing to embrace geopolitical realism, to recognize that even tacitly encouraging the Georgians was a catastrophic mistake, to acknowledge that this sort of Russian response was to be expected, and to resolve that prudence and caution dictate a measured reaction that carefully considers our interests and the price of intervention. It is quite another to conclude that American misconduct ought to grant carte blanche to other powers to follow suit, or that no violation of human rights is worth condemning until it exceeds our own. There is a middle course here; one need not advocate intervention to recognize Russian brutality.

Points taken. And readers sure can point out Russia’s excesses. But Bush cannot without answering to his own war crimes. What Russia is doing is reprehensible, but it also reveals the deep problem of moral legitimacy that the Bush administration has fostered. If the world – not without reason – suspects that America went to war under false pretense, and has trashed the Geneva Accords, then our capacity to rally world opinion on a matter like Georgia is compromised. The impact on America’s entire support for human rights and international law of the past eight years is only beginning to sink in. But it’s real. And it’s why the only way to regain it is to elect someone who opposed the war and who will end torture for good.

(Photo: A Georgian man checks the pulse of a body after they were hit by a Russian shell in Stalin square, on August 12, 2008 in Gori, Georgia. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an end to the military operations against Georgia, which had been widely condemned by the internationally community. Following their sustained incursion into the disputed Georgia region of South Ossetia, Russian troops have been given orders to withdraw. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

Cheney or Putin?

Ross on Georgia:

There are also places where American policymakers have to choose: They can try to forge major-power cooperation against the threat of terrorism joined to WMD, or they can try to unite a democratic bloc to oppose the interests of the Chinese and the Russians. And to my mind, the Russian Near Abroad, whether in the Caucuses or Central Asia, is a place where conservatives would be better served making the War on Terror our lodestar; the alternative has the potential to leave America’s national interest hostage to the territorial ambitions of the government in Tbilisi, which is not a position in which a superpower ought to lightly place itself.

A key point: Russia is not exporting a totalitarian ideology; it is flexing its military power in its backyard, as it has always done and always will. Since Cheney has exactly the same view about the use of American military power as Putin does about Russian power, I’m not sure what grounds he has to complain. Maybe we should start complaining when as many Georgians have perished as Iraqis – and when Putin throws thousands of innocent Georgians into torture chambers.

Georgia, Bushlashed

A great piece by Fred Kaplan in Slate recalls of all the reckless assurances that Bush had already given the Georgians, as if saying something makes it true:

If the Europeans had let Bush have his way, we would now be obligated by treaty to send troops in Georgia’s defense. That is to say, we would now be in a shooting war with the Russians. Those who might oppose entering such a war would be accused of "weakening our credibility" and "destroying the unity of the Western alliance."

And the over-reach is still going on:

The sad truth is that—in part because the Cold War is over, in part because skyrocketing oil prices have engorged the Russians’ coffers—we have very little leverage over what the Russians do, at least in what they see as their own security sphere. And our top officials only announce this fact loud and clear when they issue ultimatums that go ignored without consequences.

My only fear at this point is that by pointing this out, we may goad the Bushies and neocons into finding some kind of military escalation that would bring in the US. The US has no rational basis to be as committed to Georgia as Russia is; and has very little moral standing to protest an invasion of a sovereign country.