Tag: Georgia (Country)

Hilzoy fumes over the Bush administration reportedly giving "tacit support for a Georgian assault":

I am not saying it’s all our fault. Russia and Georgia are independent actors, and their leaders are responsible for their decisions. But we are also responsible for ours, and if we knowingly encouraged, or even green-lighted, Saakashvili’s actions, that is, to my mind, a piece of idiocy on a par with encouraging the Iraqi Shi’a to revolt after the Gulf War. We should not create expectations we are not prepared to meet.

On foreign policy, you get statements like this from spokesman Tucker Bounds:

The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn’t merely raise questions about Senator Obama’s judgment–it answers them.

Do we really want another president who reduces complex foreign affairs to this kind of schoolyard rhetoric? How’s this for an almost comic summation of all that was wrong with Bush’s foreign policy – and that McCain pledges to put on steroids:

It’s this campaign’s position that every American has a "vested interest" in the welfare of the Republic of Georgia, a key regional ally and a member of our Coalition in Iraq.

No sense of proportion, just knee-jerk confrontation from a position of powerlessness. Then the obligatory McCarthyite swerve:

Shouldn’t it be of far greater concern to Americans that the Obama campaign is pushing an attack that is "mirrored" by PR firms flaking for Putin’s Kremlin?

Re-elect Cheney. Vote McCain.

Ah, yes, Kristol and Kagan just haul out ancient columns from the 1970s that merely need the actual names of actual countries plugged in. But what are we to do now that Russia has stomped on uppity Georgia? Hewitt threatens "blunt condemnation of the Russians". Washington Times: "maximum pressure." Bob Kagan: nada, so far as I can tell in his WaPo piece. Kristol:

Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers?

What are we delaying exactly? A war against Russia? An invasion of Georgia? Nah:

Shouldn’t we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?

Emergency military aid to Georgia? You mean actually arming one side of another war? Then this:

The United States, of course, is not without resources and allies to deal with these problems and threats.

Still true, even after the wreckage of the last seven years. But not for much longer if we keep following the neocon advice.

Joe Klein counters Robert Kagan:

Russia’s assault on Georgia is an outrage. We should use all the diplomatic leverage we have (not all that much, truthfully) to end this invasion, and–as Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus argue in this more reasonable take–help Georgia to recover when it’s over. And, to be sure, neither Russia nor China are going to be our good buddies, as many of us hoped in the afterglow of the fall of communism. They will be a significant diplomat challenge.

But it is important, yet again, to call out the endless neoconservative search for new enemies, mini-Hitlers. It is the product of an abstract over-intellectualizing of the world, the classic defect of ideologues.

Propaganda is revving up:

This is from the top of the current Komsomolskaia Pravda web site: The first article read "FSB [state security] arrests 9 Georgian saboteurs: They were planning terrorists acts." The second reads "Georgian soldiers burn a family with small children before my very eyes."

A reader imagines a senior Russian official basking in the Georgia invasion, and reminiscing fondly about the man who helped make it all possible:

"What American president could possibly have done more for us?  He’s destroyed the once solid American rapport with the Europeans, with his government more distrusted now than the Chinese. He’s united the Middle East against America and destroyed forever America’s authority to act there unilaterally. He will yet attack Iran, which would be the biggest boon for us of all. He will destroy their reactors, and we will sell them new ones, and fortify our gas alliance on a Moscow to Tehran axis. All of this opens the door for Russia to reassert itself precisely just as Russia rebuilds following a decade of uncertainty. 

George W. Bush is exactly the president Russia would have wished for, the man who paves the way for Russia’s reemergence with his own crass heavy-handedness. I remember when crass heavy-handedness was the Kremlin’s forte!"

Carter deeply weakened the US by fecklessness, naivete and inaction. Bush has weakened the US far more by fecklessness, naivete and extreme, ill-considered, badly managed action.

The antidote to Carter was Reagan. The antidote to Bush is Obama.

Not quite as Bill Kristol advertizes:

Russia must be condemned for its unsanctioned intervention. But the war began as an ill-considered move by Georgia to retake South Ossetia by force. Saakashvili’s larger goal was to lead his country into war as a form of calculated self-sacrifice, hoping that Russia’s predictable overreaction would convince the West of exactly the narrative that many commentators have now taken up.

I’m struck by how Iraq still casts a shadow. On what grounds, after all, does the Bush administration condemn Russia? Launching a war without UN permission? Er … it’s not that easy for the US to go all high-minded at this point. How strong is the NATO alliance in reacting to this kind of provocation? Immeasurably weakened by the past seven years. Why is Russia so much more powerful than it was? Putin’s political skills and oil – whose value has sky-rocketed since the US invasion of the Middle East.

Georgia, alas, is within Russia’s traditional field of influence, and was provoking the kind of massive over-reaction they’re now getting.

The fantasy that a country like Georgia, however much we may want to support its democratic aspirations, is a big player in great power politics – fecklessly encouraged by the abstract "freedom-is-on-the-march" utopianism of Bush – has now been thoroughly debunked. No, this is not Bush’s fault. But it is partly his fault that our options and moral standing are so limited in response. Georgians, led foolishly on, will now turn on the West just as emotionally as they once foolishly glommed onto it. And no, this is not Czechoslovakia or Hungary. Russia is no longer a totalitarian country, just a corrupt-but-relatively-free-market autocracy on the steroids of the oil bonanza. But Russia is still Russia.

The US will do nothing but diplomacy because there is no vital interest at stake in Georgia, and because the US military is completely absorbed in two wars that make this Georgia-Russia conflict a tea-party. Russia knows this; the US knows this; the EU knows this; and the Georgian leadership was too cocky to absorb it.

So can we quit the hyper-ventilating, please? This is another indicator of how the world is not uni-polar, and how badly this administration has managed American soft and hard power for the last seven years. A stronger, more belligerent Russia is part of the post-Bush picture. And there’s not much anyone can do about it now.

"I suppose if we are thinking about turning our country over to the second Carter term — or the first McGovern — it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see Russia go into its Aghanistan mode … or Czechoslovakia … or Hungary … or (as Roger reminds us) Georgia," – Andy McCarthy, NRO.

This is worth noting because Obama will not be able to go to the bathroom as president without members of the Dolchstoss right blaming him for every act of every potential aggressor or threat in the world. The idea that the Georgia-Russia spat, which has roots deep into the history not just of the Cold War but of centuries, is somehow the fault of Obama beggars belief. But what else did we expect?

James Joyner has the best summary of the Russia-Georgia conflict.

Poulos is covering the Russia-Georgia smackdown.