Since the Russian tanks began to roll into Georgia, I have been mulling it over, reading about it, and wanted to offer just a few cautions. As fun as it might be to have the Russians for enemies again, right back in the psychic spot they occupied my entire childhood, the snarl over there ain’t that simple. Two points need to be made, one on geopolitical realities and the other on domestic politics.
But before making either point, the first thing to say is that I am not carrying any water for anybody. Wars in that part of the world are savage, and they are almost always savage in both directions. Looking at that region aghast should not be taken as a desire to defend one set of atrocities over against another set of atrocities.
The dispute is over South Ossetia. North Ossetia is in Russia, and the South Ossetians aren’t Georgians, and don’t want to be part of Georgia. Neither does Abkhazia, another breakaway province. There was fierce fighting with the central government of Georgia over this in the early nineties, and they have had de facto independence since 1991. So the battle is between the ethnic regionalists and the centralizing nationalists. This round of fighting began with a Georgian attack on South Ossetia, designed to reconquer it. The first invasion here was south to north, not north to south. The Russian invasion was a response to that.
And it won’t do to issue a general absolution because the nationalists are “democrats,” because a big part of the conflict with those regions was over the central government’s banning of regional political parties. A little hard ball democracy if you will. So this appears to me to be just a good, old-fashioned brawl, with no genuine, identifiable good guys in the saloon anywhere. Staying clean out might be a good idea, if anybody were to ask my opinion.
But if the Georgians got the go-ahead for their military move from Washington (and as a close ally it is hard to imagine they did not), then this was a foreign policy blunder of magnificent proportions. Don’t start what you can’t finish. Putin, who is no choir boy, now has pretty much what he wants, and we are not really in any position to do anything about it. Somewhere in Washington, someone is trying to deal with what appeared to have been a bright idea at the time.
I am not assuming here that there could be no good arguments from the Georgian side about the illegitimacy of the two breakaway provinces. There well might be. It is just that if you initiate a procedure to settle the dispute by military means, you might also have to be content with the Russians winning that particular argument.
Now, domestic politics. This was trumpeted as one of those famous 3 a.m. moments from Hillary’s ad, which it was. And McCain had the complete advantage over Obama because McCain knows what side he is on — he is against the Russians, period, and is good friends with the Georgians, another period. In contrast, Obama is instinctively on the side of mousy little lovers of peace with mahogany paneled offices in the Hague. So he first issued the standard liberal gas (calling for calm on both sides, etc.) but within a very short period of time was dragged over into McCain’s position. The interests of empire can take down pretty boys like Obama before breakfast.