The Washington Post on Georgia

by Cheryl Rofer

The news coverage of the situation in Georgia has ranged from inadequate to execrable the last few days. Transparent propaganda on all sides, stuff left out and stuff very likely made up.

Today's Washington Post, however, begins to track back to providing useful and reasonably accurate information on its op-ed page. I don't totally endorse any of the op-eds, but at least they are beginning to look more like news than copying someone's party line.

Paul Saunders of the Nixon Center gives a more balanced background for Mikheil Saakashvili's presidency in Georgia.

Georgia's internal realities help make clear that the fighting erupted not primarily because of what the country represents but because of its government's actions. Tbilisi could have avoided the confrontation by deferring its ambitions to subjugate South Ossetia and pursuing them through strictly peaceful means.

Few seem to remember that the United States and Russia worked together with the Georgian opposition to ease out then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and facilitate the election that ultimately brought Saakashvili into office. Russian views of Saakashvili changed over the past five years as Moscow perceived Tbilisi to become increasingly hostile and watched Saakashvili use threats of force to topple the government of another autonomous region, Ajaria, in 2004.

None of this justifies Russia's actions. But even if Moscow had been lying in wait for Saakashvili to provide an excuse to act, it was all the more foolish for him to do so.

Strobe Talbott takes note of the heavy-handed Russian use of words that has sounded so Soviet to me and points out Russia's attempt at analogy to events in Kosovo. He also notes what I think is the scariest statement from the Russians:

A question that looms large in the wake of the past week is whether Russian policy has changed with regard to the permanence of borders. That seemed to be what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was hinting yesterday when he said, "You can forget about any discussion of Georgia's territorial integrity." He ridiculed "the logic of forcing South Ossetia and Abkhazia to return to being part of the Georgian state."

Lavrov is a careful and experienced diplomat, not given to shooting off his mouth. That makes his comments all the more unsettling.

Andres Martinez lists Russia's grievances against the West, and the United States in particular, since 1991. And I would add that the agreement with Poland to site US missiles on Polish soil isn't going to help.

Olga Ivanov, an intern at the Post, joins all of us who are worrying about the uncritical passthrough of government propaganda by the media. She's worrying mostly about the US media, but Paul Goble tells us that Russians aren't so happy with their media, either.

Just a small request to Olga, though, and a few others, including Mikheil Saakashvili. Could we quit with the Hitler-Stalin-Chamberlin-WWII analogies? I know that they're a cheap way to put oneself on the side of right and justice and the other guy on the side of ultimate evil, but they don't add anything to understanding what's going on. Nobody in this scrap is bent on world domination. Nobody is driven by an insane ideology of racial purity. Nobody is trying to unite the workers of the world against capitalism. I would even argue that the sort of war waged by and against Hitler is impossible in today's world, but I'll do that in a later post. So it doesn't apply. And using this overused analogy makes you look stupid and unprincipled. I am hoping that its overuse this time around finally burns it out. (Update: Also in the Post, Michael Dobbs tells us that Putin is not Hitler! It's well worth reading for the background it provides, too.)

So all those articles together are finally saying some of the things I've been concerned about the last few days. And it only took the MSM, oh, a week or so to begin to get their act together.

Comments

[Jason]

Absolutely, let's cut out the Nazi Germany comparisons, unless you're a three-star general officer trying to explain why we need missile defense in Poland.
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Iran and North Korea are making large investments in long-range missiles that could strike the United States and its allies, he said. It is an era of development that Obering likened to Nazi Germany's industrial build-up before World War II.

"We were telegraphed what the Nazis were doing and nobody heeded those warnings," Obering said. "We see that same belligerent dissent today with Iran."
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(sigh) whatta maroon...

[James]

There is a gross overemphasis on simplistic good guys/bad guys narratives in the media. It's easy to write and easy for the reading public to understand. That is also happens to dovetail neatly with the needs of official propaganda is just a bonus, from the media's point of view, since all they have to do is punch up the government's communiques and voila! they have this morning's edition...

One of my favorite lines from a movie is from The Zero Effect: "There's no good guys or bad guys! It's...it's just a bunch of GUYS!" I am deeply suspicious of any claims to moral superiority in this matter. Croatia gets to be a country, but Abkhazia doesn't. East Timor? Yes. Irian Jaya? No. Free Latvia, but not the Western Sahara. There doesn't seem to be any objective criteria for who gets to be a country except for the cynical logic of realpolitik. New nations get formed out of superpower rivalry; independence for South Ossetia was therefore impossible until the US took an interest in the region.

And why should it be any different when all borders are still based on the colonial powers' division of the spoils and Cold War cease-fire lines? I said it in an earlier comment: these aren't countries, these are fiefs handed out to local elites by the UN and the great powers in exchange for loyalty. The interests and desires of the local population get only lip service and there is widespread annoyance whenever they try to assert themselves politically.

In the end, the Georgian minorities cannot be blamed for playing the only angle they have. There were offered no legal recourse, no way of attaining their goals without acquiring a superpower patron. It's not their game and they are in no position to change the rules.

[Courtenay Barnett]

Let’s be honest for a change. There is a Gulliverian, Russia, that the US seeks to have tied down by Lilliputian, states surrounding Russian, in service of the greater game. Brzezinski’s objective, as does the broader foreign policy game, sees gains in Caspaian oil.
We can all soon turn the page to the next script, while hopefully ( as I said in an earlier post – they will all settle it through the Security Council). If you feel that there is sense in continuing to provoke the proxy wars of the puppets, let’s just hope that one of the big powers does not one day miscalculate and then take the MAD ( mutually assured destruction) route to global annihilation.