Georgia Vs. Russia: The Blame America (or at least the Neo Cons) Version

The situation on the ground in Georgia continues to get more dire and remains fluid. The latest is Russian troops have moved into west Georgia, well out of the area of the Ossetia province.

Russian forces seized several towns and a military base deep in western Georgia on Monday, opening a second front in the fighting. Georgia's president said his country had been effectively cut in half with the capture of the main east-west highway near Gori.

Fighting also raged Monday around Tskhinvali, the capital of the separatist province of South Ossetia. Russian warplanes launched new air raids across Georgia, with at least one sending screaming civilians running for cover.

The reported capture of the key Georgian city of Gori and the towns of Senaki, Zugdidi and Kurga came despite a top Russian general's claim earlier Monday that Russia had no plans to enter Georgian territory. By taking Gori, which sits on Georgia's only east-west highway, Russia can cut off eastern Georgia from the country's western Black Sea coast.

Furthermore, the Russian Foreign Minister has released this troubling statement (H/T on both to Little Green Footballs)

I quote again: “Saakashvili must go.”

This is completely unacceptable and crosses a line. I want to ask Ambassador Churkin, is your government’s objective regime change in Georgia, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Georgia. Mr. President, Russia must affirm their aim is not to change the democratically elected government of Georgia and it accepts the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia .

It appears more and more that Russia is using this conflict to expand their sphere of influence and intimidate as many of its neighbors into installing pro Russia governments. I mentioned in my last piece that Russia is in many ways no different than any bully on any playground. The problem with a bully is that every inch they are given gives them a mile. Bullies rely on intimidation. If Georgia is intimidated into overthrowing their government and installing a pro Russian government it is only a matter of time before another small neighbor faces a similar threat.

This situation is very dire and Russia must not be allowed to follow through on this power grab at all costs. If they are we will eventually have to face off with them when they are in significantly stronger position.

That's why I am extremely troubled by some of commentary from the left.

But don't let that fool ya. With Word War IV--Norman Podhoretz's ridiculous oversell of the struggle against jihadi extremism--on a slow burn for the moment, Kagan et al are showing renewed interest in the golden oldies of enemies, Russia and China. This larval neo-crusade has influenced the campaign of John McCain, with his comic book proposal for a League of Democracies and his untenable proposal to kick the Russians out of the G8.

To be sure, 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. It is, as we have seen the last eight years, a dangerous way to behave internationally. And it has severely damaged our moral authority in the world...I mean, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after Abu Ghraib, after our blithe rubbishing of the Geneva Accords, why should anyone listen to us when we criticize the Russians for their aggression in the Caucasus?

So, while paying lip service to confronting naked aggression, an act of war, and a violation of territorial sovereignty, Joe Klein focuses most of his venom on anyone that dares try to say that Russia is not our friend. He calls on the world community for nebulous diplomatic action. There's more of that thought where that came from.

Commenter Aleks asks “Doesn’t the speculative rather than dry reporting nature of the blog free you to guess at what the hell President Mikhail Saakashvili could possibly have expected to happen?” It does! Best guess is that the central element in his calculation was that there’s only one road from Russia in to South Ossetia. Saakashvili was hoping, I think, that Georgia’s newly upgraded forces could quickly seize Tskhinvali and then either capture or destroy the tunnel connecting Russia to South Ossetia. Obviously, he misjudged his own country’s capabilities

Now, it is Georgia that is portrayed as the aggressor and the one that forced the hand of Russia.


Of course, Vladimir Putin is no dummy. I won't pretend to get in his head however I doubt very much that he overlooked a clear diplomatic step to counter his attack. Much more likely in fact, Putin knows full well that there are no good diplomatic actions the world can take to stop this. In fact, what is most likely is that he knows the world doesn't have the will to confront him militarily and the outlet to confront him diplomatically. Putin was around when the world community rallied around Hezbollah and called on Israel to show restraint in responding to naked aggression on their borders. In fact, Putin likely is counting on useful idiots just like Klein to try and temper any move by the U.S. and its allies to show strength. He is counting on those like Klein to make sure that public support for military force is taken off the table even before it is suggested.

It seems this deviousness and evil is totally lost on Klein. Instead, he sees a class of American thinkers as using this attack as some sort of nefarious war mongering of their own. As such, the debate gets muddied and now instead of focusing all attention on the perpetrators of the aggression we are going to spend time debating our own role in it. Again, Putin is, in my opinion, evil, but he is not dumb. In fact, he is quite intelligent and I suspect he counted on much of this when he made this order.

Putin was front and center in the debate when the sympathies of the world turned on a dime from that of the attacked Israel to that of Hezbollah. Within weeks, the world community was putting pressure on Israel to let up. This was done in part through an ingenius propaganda campaign that turned the attacked into the attackers. Within a month, Israel was forced to stop the war before they could finish off Hezbollah. Any propaganda campaign relies on so called useful idiots that find themselves allied with your cause without realizing it. That, I am afraid, is what is happening with such commentators as Joe Klein and Matt Yglesias.