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.