The Telling Gloss

By Cernig

Today, the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, has an op-ed in the WSJ describing Georgia's conflict with Russia as "a war for the West" - and this is what he writes about how the current conflict got to the shooting stage:

In April, Russia began treating the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as Russian provinces. Again, our friends in the West asked us to show restraint, and we did. But under the guise of peacekeeping, Russia sent paratroopers and heavy artillery into Abkhazia. Repeated provocations were designed to bring Georgia to the brink of war.

When this failed, the Kremlin turned its attention to South Ossetia, ordering its proxies there to escalate attacks on Georgian positions. My government answered with a unilateral cease-fire; the separatists began attacking civilians and Russian tanks pierced the Georgian border. We had no choice but to protect our civilians and restore our constitutional order. Moscow then used this as pretext for a full-scale military invasion of Georgia.

"We had no choice but to protect our civilians and restore our constitutional order," is one hell of a big gloss over sending your entire armed might en masse into a breakaway region that has repeatedly voted for and called for independence. 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 there's that "unilateral" ceasefire that was then "unilaterally" broken by Georgia's entire army. It's the kind of "no look at the mess, look at the freedom" gloss that we're all too familiar with from neocon pronouncements here in the US.

But the BBC's Q&A on the dispute characterizes the start of major hostilities rather differently.

What triggered the latest crisis?

Tension has risen since the election of President Saakashvili in 2004. He offered South Ossetia dialogue and autonomy within a single Georgian state - but in 2006 South Ossetians voted in an unofficial referendum to press their demands for complete independence.

In April 2008 Nato said Georgia would be allowed to join the alliance at some point - angering Russia, which opposes the eastward expansion of Nato. Weeks later, Russia stepped up ties with the separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In July Russia admitted its fighter jets entered Georgian airspace over South Ossetia to "cool hot heads in Tbilisi". Occasional clashes escalated, until six people were reportedly killed by Georgian shelling. Attempts to reach a ceasefire stuttered.

How did it escalate?

After further exchanges of fire, Georgia launched an aerial bombardment and ground attack on South Ossetia on Thursday 7 August, only hours after the sides agreed a ceasefire. By Friday, Georgian forces were reportedly in control of Tskhinvali.

Needless to say, hawks in America are joined together - both far right neocons and center left Old Cold Warriors - in preferring the Georgian president's narrative. Not because it's especially true - although it's becoming a bit more true as time goes on and Russia keeps pushing beyond the natural "stop line" of a purely "status quo ante" operation - but because it plays to their own prejudices better. They're trying to decide whether Putin (who is still the real President of Russia even if his name tag now says "prime minister", as this crisis has shown) is the new Stalin, the new Hitler or both.

Not that this is a surprise, as both the big 20th century bugbears are inevitably trotted out whenever US hawks are feeling feisty. In this quarter's journal of the US Army War College, Jeffrey Record, Professor of Strategy at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, points to just how frequently the same tired and false analogy is trotted out. He writes in "Parameters":

For the past six decades every President except Jimmy Carter has routinely invoked the Munich analogy as a means of inflating national security threats and demonizing dictators. Presidents and their spokespersons have not only believed the analogy but also used it to mobilize public opinion for war.² After all, if the enemy really is another Hitler, then force becomes mandatory, and the sooner it is used the better. More recently, neoconservatives and their allies in government have branded as appeasers any and all proponents of using nonviolent conflict resolution to negotiate with hostile dictatorships. For neoconservatives, to appease is to be naïve, cowardly, and soft on the threat du jour, be it terrorism, a rogue state, or a rising great power. To appease is to be a Chamberlain rather than a Churchill, to comprise with evil rather than slay it.

The Munich analogy informed every major threatened or actual US use of force during the first two decades of the Cold War as well as the decisions to attack Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

(Hat tip - Travis Sharp.)

There's not a single modern leader - not Ahmadinajhad, not Kim and certainly not Putin - who qualifies as an analog to Hitler or Stalin. And in any case, the folks who cry "appeaser" at every turn ignore the crucial and invalidating point - Hitler planned war whether he was appeased or not.

So here's another telling gloss - the gloss of hyperbolic comparisons to the greatest threats of the last 100 years - which conceals a more complex truth. It's a gloss that has served the hawks well over six decades and partly explains, along with a history of McCarthyist hysteria, why Americans have always had a far more hostile kneejerk reaction than Western Europeans to those rightly condemnable actions of both the old Soviet Union and modern Russia. Right now it's concealing unpleasant facts: the Bush administration almost certainly knew what Georgia planned far enough in advance to stop it, but didnt; now that the can of worms has been opened, there's no stuffing them back in; short of war with Russia, there's not a lot the US or the West can do about that other than try to ameliorate the aftermath through diplomacy- and war with Russia over a tiny disputed ethnic breakaway region in a small Eastern European country isn't going to happen.

Comments

[jimbo]

" Not because it's especially true - although it's becoming a bit more true as time goes on and Russia keeps pushing beyond the natural "stop line" of a purely "status quo ante" operation "

According to whom?

The Georgians are making significant claims that to date, have not been close to the truth.

For example, they claimed to have withdrawn and stopped military operations, and yet, as of this morning, Tskhinvali is once again taking fire from Georgian artillery.

http://lenta.ru/news/2008/08/11/again/

The Georgians have claimed that Gori has fallen to Russian Forces,

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/11/georgia.russia/index.html

Yet both the Russians, and Reuters confirm that there are no Russian troops in Gori, the Georgians have simply abandoned the city and fled.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LB161645.htm

If the Georgians want peace and a cease fire, then they are going to have to stp attacking South Ossetia, and recognise that they don't get to return to the status quo. They have clearly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted.

If the EU, NATO and the US, want peace and a cease fire, then they are going to have to reign in their proxy, and recognise that they don't get to return to the status quo.

The reality appears to be that certain members of the EU, NATO and the US, would prefer that Georgia continues to poke the bear, long enough and hard enough, to become a fitting piece of propaganda, fitting in to the Neocon anti-Russia narrative as a model example.

[geoff]

I sometimes really really really wish North American corporate media would at least attempt to provide a balanced account of major news events and quite with the propaganda. Not really related to your post but off my chest.

None of the NA corp. media is really making much of stories in Russian media and sprinkled in talking points of Putin et al. Maybe no Russian speakers available to them? Russian media stories are view as eastern propaganda - i.e. they recognise their own kind? Whatever I wonder if the stories noted here have any substance:

http://www.russiablog.org/2008/08/war_in_georgia_putting.php#more

Another off topic wondering: Can anyone remember anytime that a VPOTUS made pronouncements about US potential reaction to very serious foreign policy situations when a POTUS was awake? So who is the real POTUS? Does it matter?