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Georgia: gaining perspective

August 15, 2008 By dev Comments are Off

Ok … Having sounded off on the failure of liberal pundits to express clear outrage at Russia’s incursion into Georgia, it’s time to note some parallel absurdities on the other side. Like John McCain declaring “We are all Georgians” to a room full of Middle Americans who haven’t the slightest clue what he’s talking about, but applaud anyway. Like George Bush, of all people, declaring that “bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.” And as much as I respect Marko Attila Hoare, whose parsing of the bogus Kosovo-Ossetia parallel I linked to the other day, I’m left aghast by the unhinged tone of this post, which compares Sarkozy to Neville Chamberlain, lustily proclaims the start of Cold War II and proposes all sorts of ways to turn that cold war hot. (Kosovo is not Ossetia, Marko tells us, but Georgia 2008 is Czechoslovakia 1938? And this from someone who urges us to reject false analogies?) 

At openDemocracy you’ll find a roundup of views on the conflict. Donald Rayfield’s is particularly valuable. “[A] lot of the opinion-flood persists in ignoring completely the local and regional factors in favour of an instant resort to high geopolitics,” Rayfield writes, “as if South Ossetia and Abkhazia – which lie at the heart of what has happened – do not in themselves even exist.” True, and important also to recall that Georgia’s democratic progress is really recent — in the early ’90s the place was run by the “half-demented” Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who didn’t exactly cool things down in the separatist enclaves. That history is still raw in the region.
I also admit the odiousness of Putin-Medvedev has kept me from squarely facing the faults of Saakashvili, touched upon by Rayfield and also by Gene of Harry’s Place. I’ll be following the events as closely as I can, with a particular interest in the U.S. election fallout.

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