The Minefield

Some Georgia articles today worth noting.

This time, it's definitely about oil.

Dreams of glory:

What should one make of the announcement from one of her chief admirals, Vladimir Vystosky, on the July 27 Navy Day holiday, that the Russian navy would add six carriers to its fleet--along with all of the necessary support ships that form a carrier battle group?

Above shabby realities:

Looking for an explanation that makes sense is to commit the error, as one Moscow colleague reminded me regularly, "of looking for logic inside Russian officialdom where none can possibly exist." The only explanation is more of the same irrationality that was the hallmark of the Soviet years. Announcing a robust presence with a high profile hides the basic structural defects of the Soviet military.

At the same time, the Russian government continues to shovel billions of dollars into the coffers of defense enterprises that are controlled by the inner circle of officials in the Kremlin. Which may be the ultimate explanation for an order to build carriers that cannot be built and which no one really needs. Just like arms sales to Venezuela, Algeria, and elsewhere, this aircraft carrier fantasy may end up being a wonderful mechanism for laundering money.

All in all not comforting in a nation that still has enough nuclear capacity to broil the world several times over.

Nor is this:

Perhaps the most telling illustration of what the Russians are doing in Georgia was something found found in the pocket of a Russian airman downed by the Georgian air defence: an obscene verse. The verse mocks the enemy - which is normal in wars. However, neither Georgians nor Ossetians are mentioned: the theme of this piece of doggerel was Russian troops humiliating Nato soldiers.

Whatever the humanitarian rhetoric, what Russia is really doing is a preventive strike against Nato, which happens to take place on Georgian territory. Moscow wants to teach Georgia a lesson for Tbilisi's open and defiant wish to become part of the west; it wants to send a message to the United States and Europe that it will not tolerate further encroachment on its zone of influence; and it wants to make clear to other countries in its neighbourhood (Ukraine first of all) that they are in Russia's backyard and should behave accordingly.

Which seems pretty clear to me: In Moscow, the spheres of influence still make music. Perhaps not in the exact ratios that Stalin and Churchill once agreed to. But Poland, as well as Ukraine, had best be thinking hard.

A senior Russian general warned Poland today that it was leaving itself open to retaliation - and possibly even a nuclear strike - by agreeing to host a US missile base.

General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the Russian armed forces' deputy chief of staff, issued the extraordinary threat in an interview with Interfax, a Russian news agency.

“Poland, by deploying [the system] is exposing itself to a strike - 100 per cent,” he was quoted as saying, before explaining that Russian military doctrine sanctioned the use of nuclear weapons “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them."

Would it matter to that thinking that the Western European powers went to war in 1939 ostensibly because Poland was invaded and occupied, and then left it that way after the war was over?

Finally, remember the words of Solzhenitsyn in his last interview:

Q: Recently, relations between Russia and the West have got somewhat colder. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West's reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

Friday Cat Blogging

Layla Isis

George-ya

"Georgia" and "Iraq" tend to get uttered in the same sentence a lot around here, usually in terms of complaining what a hypocrite George W. Bush is to complain about Putin's puppet's invasion of a sovereign state on phony pretexts.

Exactly the same!

E.g. here (in comments, but by the post's author):

For the record, to date, Russia has toppled ZERO governments in this decade, the US has toppled 2.

So where do we draw the line on the US?

Leaving aside the question of when progressives became so concerned with governmental stability and integrity of international borders, I'm trying to picture the Iraq venture if it had been done according to the Russian model. Some parallels do suggest themselves. You already had two separatist regions -- the Kurdish north and the Shiite south -- nominally under the protection of the U.S. (and its allies). You had any pretext you like for an attack based on infringement of that unhappy status quo -- no need to read the tea leaves on WMD when there were almost daily violations of the no-fly zone that one side never accepted.

You wouldn't have to trouble with nation-building or infrastructure reconstruction or keeping order while democracy goes through its romper room phase. No danger of being cheated by your friends in the new government, either.

Just calve off the parts you want, occupy them with full force, and turn lose the ethnicities and religions you favor to drive out the ones you don't. Take a few big bites out of the rump nation you leave behind, just to square off your fronts and make the point stick. Then let your enemy's friends figure out how to keep it alive.

Which, in the case of Iraq, would have been the governments and national oil companies of France and Russia.

For starters.

Remember Iraq?

They do.

Ofcourseyourealizethismeanswar.com

Interesting.

As it turns out, the July [Internet access] attack [against Web sites in the Republic of Georgia] may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia. According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.

But it will likely not be the last, said Bill Woodcock, the research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that tracks Internet traffic. He said cyberattacks are so inexpensive and easy to mount, with few fingerprints, they will almost certainly remain a feature of modern warfare.

“It costs about 4 cents per machine,” Mr. Woodcock said. “You could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread, so you would be foolish not to.”

Somehow the line got out quickly in the U.S. that Russia was just sitting there minding its own and watching the Olympics when those hot-headed Georgians, drunk on U.S. neocon rhetoric, mugged them. The closer you look at the long-simmering feud over these "breakaway regions," the more you see the hands twisting the oven dials under the pot. You need a lot more information than most opinionators have offered to judge who wanted this boil-over right now.

The Ancient 'Computer'

In words, pictures, and video. "Awesome" is the current most-overused word. But this is awesome.

Herbert Hoover

I meant to post something two days ago on his birthdate on Herbert Hoover, one of the great Americans of the 20th century.

You might know him as just a joke on conservatives in Norman Lear's theme song for Archie Bunker. He belongs in a class with Quincy Adams as the men who did great service to their country over long lives, with a failed term in the White House in the middle of it.

Even in Europe, which ought to remember him when we don't, he's a footnote, a "did you know?" story.

He believed in Americans, and appealed to the best in us. If even one tenth of the statistics are right, he saved the lives of millions of people. Think of that!

Someday, perhaps, I'll get a chance to write about him. Not tonight, though.

Fear Itself

Paul Krugman thinks the Republicans are scaring me away from nationalized health care with the phrase "socialized medicine."

No, sir, they aren't. I like the idea, or ideal, of basic health care for everyone. But some things Americans just do not do well. What scares me off from the notion is not GOP sloganeering. It's the VA Hospitals. The public school system. The "Social Security is broke" crisis that comes up every two years. The Farm Bill. When I think of national health care in the U.S., I think of the Post Office, with scalpels.

Georgia War

Where it stands.

"Iraq" is the unspoken name in much of the public diplomacy -- which of course is not diplomacy at all but jockeying for world opinion. Bush framed his objection thus:

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Key words being "neighboring" and "democratic." It's a nice try but he's clearly got a weaker hand here than he would have without the global ire over Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the first-linked piece, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says: "We have no plans to depose anyone, this is in general not in our political culture and not in the arsenal of our foreign policy. We do not depose, and we do not bring to the throne. Others do such things—as we know…"

No kewpie doll for figuring out which "others" he means there.

Echoes of 1956

Some aspects of the current tragedy in Georgia remind me of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, especially the role of the U.S. I think this blogger gets it right:

For the USA, though, the lesson of 1956 is clear: don't encourage the fantasies of small countries that we are in no position to help. It raises expectations that we can't fulfill, and pushes other people into bloody confrontations.

One difference is, we had only scant and secretive contact with the Hungarian people in 1956, much of it through Voice of America broadcasts by Hungarian exiles that weren't even well monitored by the U.S. government. In cases like Georgia, it ought to be explicit, if it wasn't, how far we agree to go in their defense.

More on Hungary 1956. Also, thoughts along these lines from Michelle Malkin, who, of course, would have done more in 1956.

Rebranding Cindy

Cindy Sheehan makes the ballot to oppose Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill says the speaker welcomes the challenge and has "the highest respect" for Sheehan.

I am sure. It's inside baseball to most of you, probably, but the AP slug on the story is BC-Pelosi-Sheehan Challenge

All through Sheehan's personal crusade against Bush, the AP slugs on her story were "PEACEMOM." AP keeps the same slugs on a story in a cycle; Supreme Court stories always are SCOTUS. Even if the story changes in nature, the slug generally stays the same for the sake of editors finding it again. If two children don't come home from school it will be MISSINGKIDS or something, even as the case evolves into a murder, a trial, a conviction. Even now, after almost seven years and many permutations in the news stories, the slug on any AP story on Sept. 11 begins with ATTACKS.

So the AP dubbed this woman "Peace Mom." Soon after, "Peace Mom" crept into AP's descriptions of Sheehan in, for instance, photo captions. Finally, it became her designation in the AP's headlines. 'Peace Mom' Cindy Sheehan returns to Texas for war protest. It was the Associated Press that gave her that name, then they quoted it, unattributed, in their headlines. They've also given her a much-airbrushed back story. Working overtime to nail down public perception where they believe it belongs.

But now that she's at war with the liberal Democrat from San Francisco -- for essentially the same reasons she warred on Bush, she's no longer a Peace Mom, I guess. The words "Peace Mom" appear nowhere in the Pelosi story.

Canarda

Riots in Canada?

Oh, dear. Who is going to break the news to my co-workers. Who insist there is no crime, no violence, and no racism in Canada -- always in contrast to the horrible U.S.A. It's an idealized anti-America of the mind that I privately call Canarda. But of course they've lived there (in some cases while dodging the draft here back in the Vietnam Era) and I've only visited, so of course they know more about it than I do.

Here's the AP's description of things:

Montreal's mayor on Monday promised a swift inquiry into the shooting death of a Honduran teenager by police after the incident prompted violent clashes between angry youth and authorities in a heavily Haitian neighborhood.

A police officer was shot in the leg late Sunday, cars were set ablaze, stores were looted and firefighters were pelted with beer bottles in Montreal North, a multiethnic area referred to by local police as the Bronx of Montreal for its poverty and crime.

Several hundred officers in riot gear fanned out in the area, searching for a group of youths suspected of torching eight cars parked outside a fire station. Six people were arrested.

Crime, violence, and racism. Sounds a little less like perfection and a little more like everywhere else.

Little Things

Switching into Andy Rooney mode here ...

These are little things that piss me off, because they're typically written by people who profess to know more than I do and thus instruct me. OK, Andy Rooney wouldn't have said "piss me off."

Here's Cernig, a smart guy who always leaves me with the impression that, if you disagree with him, he thinks it's because you don't know as much as he does. Or else you have neocon, which is a sort of incurable disease. In my case, the answer is "both."

He writes, "war with Russia over a tiny disputed ethnic breakaway region in a small Eastern European country isn't going to happen." Which I agree with as an assessment. But Georgia is south of the Caucasus, and I've always thought the Caucasus was the boundary between Europe and Asia. My knowledge tends to become outdated, but I looked it up and Georgia still seems to be in Asia.

It's a little thing, but for someone whose weight of argument seems tilted toward "I'm right because I know more than you do," it sticks. Sort of like watching a ballet master take a tumble off a street curb.

He also, by the way, says:

Saakashvili has absolutely no evidence, of course, for his claim that Russia "ordered it's proxies" to carry out attacks (It might have, but he can't prove even word one of it) ....

And then later says:

... the Bush administration almost certainly knew what Georgia planned far enough in advance to stop it, but didnt ....

Which is basically making the same sort of talking-out-the-ass statement he accuses Saakashvili of making. The difference of course being that Cernig isn't president of anything (so far as I know) and can't send armies to war. Which is a big difference. But in terms of someone sifting through his arguments, I imagine it's not a point that inspires much confidence.

As for what the Bush Administration knew or didn't know, I thought one of the enduring lessons of the last 8 years is the fantastic amount of what goes on in the world that's news to Bush when it gets into the newspapers. I thought that was one of the hammering points of his opponents. Of course you can have it both ways, if you presume a marvelous Richelieu-esque duplicity on the part of the boob from Texas, that he only pretends to be surprised so he can further his agenda, which thrives on chaos and American blundering.

As for Georgia, it's painful to watch. I like Georgia and its people and government, and the Russians seem to be using this excuse to mojo up after a long spell of humiliation. Like the Grenada invasion looked to some people back in the '80s. If the Russians had popped the first shot, we'd be in a different situation. If the Georgians had gone in with more care and less artillery, things would look different too. Instead, it's like watching a good friend go Leroy Jenkins into a minefield. You just wait till it's over and hope there's enough of him left to patch back together.

I also am sticking with Demophilus' early observation that this ultimately is about Abkhasia, not South Ossetia.

* * *

The Associated Press, meanwhile, in writing about Radovan Karadzic has taken to calling the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica Europe's worst slaughter since World War II. [Other accounts vary -- "massacre" and "atrocity" also appear.]

But it's the "since World War II" that sticks in my craw. Which is only possible for AP to write because it and the rest of us have so long blocked out the period 1945 to 1950 in Europe, when truly nasty things were done on a large scale to subject peoples, often by our then-allies, often with at least the passive cooperation of the U.S. occupiers, and often to peoples who were deemed to have taken the wrong side in the just-ended war.

The exact details of who did what to whom are the subject of furious debate and have become hopelessly entangled in cranks and conspiracy-mongers, mainly because the stories largely have been left to such people by the academics. But the numbers, even in the most conservative estimates for some specific cases, go beyond Srebrenica's 8,000.

Two Words that End in 'O'

Being 'bingo,' and 'ditto'

This is a fight to the death for power and the distribution of wealth. It is about ideology only to the extent that ideologies are masks for interests. Of course each contender is going to do whatever it takes to win, within the vague and shifting limits set by public revulsion. ... There are times when I find myself liking one or the other or both candidates and being saddened by the unrelenting vitriol that's spat at and about them. And other times when I think, Good! We test our candidates like gladiators. Whichever one is left standing might just be tough enough for the job.

... So, to put it as crudely as possible: the rich don't want to be taxed; the poor want more handouts; and everybody in between is trying to figure out whether life is better for them (us) under the frankly powerful or under those whose power derives from purporting to represent the interests of the powerless.

Realm of the Coin

A direct hit, and a new, good word:

It is sometimes difficult when reading [linguist, progressive, and "Don't Think of an Elephant!" author George P.] Lakoff to know where his political advocacy ends and his cognitive-linguistics scholarship begins. When I ask him about that, he acknowledges that his political celebrity has put a strain on his scholarly work, but he insists that he has not abandoned linguistics for politics: "The work I do in politics is linguistics, it is linguistics about political subjects — it is advocacy linguistics." That means, he says, "I do a simple linguistic analysis, and then I say based on that analysis you should do this, this, and that. But it all rests on doing the linguistics."

Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even more skeptical than [Steven] Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the "neuroenthusiasta," his term for cognitive scientists who overstate the implications of their research, and the journalists who breathlessly hype their findings. According to Flanagan, brain science is only helpful to the extent that it tells us something we don't already know. To illustrate his point, he offers an analogy: When children learn how to ride a bike, something changes in their brains. If a scientist offers parents a detailed description of that neurological transformation, it might be interesting, but it won't help children learn to ride a bike.

At one point, Lakoff makes Chomsky (an academic arch-rival) looks reasonable by comparison. He also wants to take credit for Obama. Take a number, George.

Caucasus War

This has been a good blog for keeping up with it.

Thank You, John Edwards

Thanks to you, men all across America -- guys who work hard and play by the rules -- will go home tonight to a little more bitterness, shorter fuzes, heightened suspicion. It's not much of a legacy. But it's what you've got.

Other than that, I don't think this story makes a damn bit of difference, unless you really thought this politician was somehow in a different category than the rest. If you want a different category, try Barney Frank. Who I'd vote for in a heartbeat if -- well -- straight talk and frankness were the sole considerations.

But think about it. There are tens of millions of Democrats out there with passionate beliefs, ideals, and thirst for change of one sort or another, and this man rode hard to be their standard-bearer, their sole knight in the crucial battle, knowing that his cardboard armor would crumple at the first hit.

Council Winners

The latest batch of Watchers Council winners have been posted.

First place in the council went to Winning in Afghanistan by Joshuapundit.

Votes also went to Why Exploit Our Domestic Resources by Wolf Howling; What is a Windfall Profit? by Rhymes with Right; and Marin County’s Hidden Conservatives by Bookworm Room.

The last post reminds me that many blogs are strongest when they hew most closely to the daily realities of the people who write them. That is the one topic about which you may be assured I know more than you do: What happens to me day in and day out. But it is not possible to write a daily blog on world affairs or politics in that vein unless you are one of the 300 or so people who move and shake those places. In which case you probably don't want to broadcast your daily life.

Outside the council, the winner was Obama Be by Classical Values, which was worthy for recalling in detail the program for radicals (what we now generally call "progressives") outlined circa 1970 by Saul Alinsky. It's impressive to see how deeply it has taken root, so deeply that many people who swim in it daily never heard of Alinsky or realized that someone first spelled it all out. Hillary Rodham wrote her senior honors thesis at Wellesley College on Alinsky. Obama certainly owes him a debt, in his community organizer phase. Wikipedia sums up Alinsky thus:

Alinsky was a critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice.

Votes also went to The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon by Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, a post remarkable because not only does it detail a distant problem, it suggesting things that the average American can do that might help relieve it.

Laid to Rest

I don't think we ever really understood Solzhenitsyn. When he came to America, we wanted him to like us and be one of us, which is generally how we treat foreign dignitaries.

Solzhenitsyn offers us the great lesson of a dissident who was a passionate nationalist. We don't see that type often here. Even more seldom do we grow them. Our dissidents tend to identify themselves as "citizens of the world" or of humanity, and to regard America, and especially American nationalism, as the world's great evil.

He lived in Vermont, and his heart never left Mother Russia. His courtesy to us, his gift to us in exchange for our hospitality, was to look at America as a patriotic dissident would, and say the things about it a dissident nationalist would say about us, if we had one, if Solzhenitsyn had been an American. We are only beginning to appreciate the gift.

The Coming Revanche

From a review of Robert Kagan's new book:

In his recent speech before an adoring crowd in Berlin, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama implored leaders in the United States and Western Europe to “reject the Cold War mindset of the past” in their dealings with Russia. This was an implicit rebuke to his Republican opponent, John McCain, who has talked tough on Russia, going so far as to raise the possibility of kicking it out of the G-8 for its domestically illiberal and externally aggressive behavior. Kagan, an informal advisor to McCain, even compares “the mood of recrimination in Russia today” to German anger after the supposed humiliations of the Versailles Treaty—and we’re all familiar with what followed after the signing of that punitive accord. Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, no doubt to be continued by his handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, has been buttressed by the country’s astounding economic growth under his leadership: between 1998 and 2006, Kagan writes, the Russian economy has grown by more than 50 percent. Remember all the stories about Russian decline, the endless reports of soaring alcoholism rates and grinding poverty? They’ve gone the way of Boris Yeltsin, along with whatever hopes there were of Russian liberalism.

From Solzhenitsyn's last interview:

Q: Recently, relations between Russia and the West have got somewhat colder. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West's reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

Aren't they describing the same thing, taking into account that they stand on opposite sides of it?

In the 1990s when Russia was down I longed for the West to give it a hand up, because it was the most self-interested thing we could have done. The Marshall Plan for a new millennium. Instead, the people I knew only salivated over a "peace dividend" they never saw anyhow.