Georgia On My Mind

Why in Hell did the Russkies invade Georgia? (At least they haven't taken Atlanta — yet.) Unfortunately, poor folk in Georgia are losing their lives and that is the grim reality. Georgia has become another Hell in a very small place. The Dubster has dispatched Kidna-Lies-Alot Rice to bring both sides to the table. However, that dunce can't even wipe the table, let alone broker a cease-fire. In the meantime, The Hopester is being advised by the Russophobe, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński, and The Geezer is being advised by Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist for the current regime in Georgia. No one's hands are clean in this sorry mess. If this is (fair & balanced) realpolitik, so be it.


[x Slate]
World Inaction
By Anne Applebaum

(Summary: Russia Invades Georgia While The West Watches. How Did It Come To This?)

For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no further than the BBC's split-screen coverage of Friday's Olympics opening ceremony. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos, and so on. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world's rising powers were strutting their stuff.

The difference, of course, is that one event has been in rehearsal for years while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. And that, too, is significant. The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is, in a certain sense, predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves, and they do not try to provoke crises.

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes a response more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have now become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular "frozen" conflict has escalated right now. Russian sources said that Georgia had launched an invasion of South Ossetia, aiming to pacify the breakaway region. Georgia, meanwhile, said that its troops entered the South Ossetian "capital" in response to escalating South Ossetian attacks, which have been going on for a week—years, really—as well as the Russian aerial bombardment of Georgian territory.

But there are other players involved—paramilitaries, provocateurs, even peacekeepers, some of whom (Russians) have apparently been killed—and a complicated chain of events with myriad possible interpretations. Previous tensions—both in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other piece of Georgia that has declared sovereignty—had somehow been resolved without an actual war. Someone, clearly, wanted this one to go further.

Both sides have deeper motives for fighting. The Russians have an interest in preventing Georgia from joining NATO, as Georgia, a Western-oriented democracy—George Bush called the country a "beacon of liberty"—has long wanted to do. In this, the Russians will almost certainly succeed. There is no Western power that has any interest in a military ally that is involved in a major military conflict with Russia.

The Georgian leadership, by contrast, had come to believe that the constant pressure of Russian aggression, coupled with the West's failure to accept Georgia into NATO, compelled them to demonstrate "self-reliance." Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has been buying weapons in preparation for this moment. Those who know him say he believed a military conflict was inevitable but could be won if conducted cleverly. As of Friday night, with Russian soldiers fighting in South Ossetia—only a few dozen miles from Tblisi, the Georgian capital—it seems as if he might have miscalculated, badly. Russia has not sent 150 tanks across that border in order to lose.

Still, the bottom line is this: Georgia should have stepped back from the brink—and should still do so if it has a chance—but Russia's deployment of such a large and carefully prepared force, not only in South Ossetia but in the rest of Georgia, is totally unacceptable. And the other indisputable conclusion? Wherever the blame for this week's escalation is finally laid, the West has very little influence on the outcome. Saakashvili's appeals for help and moral support—"This is not about Georgia," he told CNN, "it is about America, its values"—aren't going to come to much unless Russia wants them to.

Everyone is trying very hard, it is true: Even as I am writing this, a dozen or more diplomats and heads of state are crowding the telephone lines between Beijing and the Caucasus,* trying to get both sides to stop fighting, right now, and to worry later about who started it. Perhaps they'll succeed—or perhaps those who wanted this battle to start also want it to continue.

In any case, the time to deal with this conflict was two years ago or four years ago. That there was a security vacuum in the Caucasus; that this vacuum was dangerous; that war was likely; that Georgia, an eager ally of the United States, would not come out of it well; that a successful invasion of Georgia, a country with U.S. troops on its soil, would reflect badly on the West—all of that has been obvious for a long time. Cowardice, weakness, lack of ideas, and above all the distraction of other events prevented any deeper engagement. And now it may be too late.

[Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist; Applebaum also is a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History (2003) and the book won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Applebaum earned a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale University in 1986, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics she earned another bachelor's degree.]

Copyright © 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co.

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The Big Difference Between TR & The Geezer? One Of Them Is Stupid!

The Geezer couldn't carry TR's jock. Theodore Roosevelt would have little patience with McNasty, as he was known at Annapolis, who graduated fifth from the bottom of his Naval Academy class. TR was an honor student at Harvard and, unlike The Geezer, none of his books were ghost-written. Paris Hilton had it right: The Geezer is a wrinkly, white-headed guy. The Geezer is creepy. When TR was president, he invited members of the Naval Academy boxing team to the White House for sparring sessions in the Oval Office. TR enjoyed smacking the Middies around the room. 'Tis a pity that TR couldn't have smacked The Geezer up side the head. If this is (fair & balanced) ageism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Rushmore Or Less
By Timothy Egan

In most every profile of Senator John McCain, there is some mention of his hero and role model — the bespectacled progressive who is one of the fab four on Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt.

Teddy has aged well, beloved both by Democratic environmentalists who feel he would appreciate the Emily Dickinson line that “hope is the thing with feathers,” and by Republican foreign policy hardliners who see a bird of a different type — the hawk.

I’ve spent the last two years trying to understand Roosevelt’s life and political convictions, reading his letters, books and speeches, as well as press accounts of him. From nearly every perspective, the John McCain of 2008 is no Teddy Roosevelt.

You start with the obvious: Roosevelt was the youngest man to become president, sworn into office in 1901 at the age of 42, after McKinley was shot. McCain, if elected, would be the oldest at 72.

McCain has attacked Barack Obama for his popularity, on the advice of Karl Rove acolytes in his camp who think that being a global celebrity is a bad thing.

You want celebrity? As the most popular American in the dawning decade of the American Century, Teddy Roosevelt was a global superstar — “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” as Mark Twain wrote.

He spoke to throngs in Europe, gave lasting speeches at the Sorbonne and Oxford. Often, he parried with his foreign guests in their own language. During his travels throughout Europe, South America and Africa, he could not so much as bite into a sandwich without being asked to comment on the bread.

Stirring words meant something coming from Roosevelt. The man and the persona could shape world opinion.

Both McCain and Roosevelt are Republicans, though Roosevelt famously bolted from his party to run as a Progressive in 1912, trying for a third term after sitting out four years in favor of the befuddled William H. Taft.

But Roosevelt clearly tried to steer his party away from what would now be seen as its hard-right elements — big money, anti-environmentalism, race-baiting — into what he called in his autobiography “the fairly radical progressive party.”

Born of money in New York City, educated at Harvard and fussy in dress, Teddy Roosevelt might today be seen as, um, an elitist. But he turned against his class, not just busting the monopolies and promoting public ownership of natural resources, as most students of his presidency know, but taking hard verbal swipes at the predatory rich.

He called them “malefactors of great wealth” and “the most dangerous members of the criminal class — the criminals of great wealth,” in two of his best-known phrases.

Appalled by the historic gap between rich and poor, Roosevelt favored a national inheritance tax. “Of all the forms of tyranny, the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy,” he said.

A century later, in a time of similar disparity between rich and poor, McCain wants to cut the corporate tax rate, and keep those tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that ushered in the Bush age of privilege. His campaign is thick with lobbyists who embody everything about how power in Washington has shifted to the well-connected moneyed class.

“I have often been called a socialist,” Roosevelt wrote. In fact, he despised the far left as much as the far right. But he said, “I have always maintained that our worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change.”

McCain sidles up to Big Oil and calls for more drilling, whereas Roosevelt went after the resource monopolies. When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to his campaign, he requested that it be sent back.

Teddy was also known for a big stick foreign policy and his heroics as a warrior; in that sense the McCain comparisons may be closer to the mark. Roosevelt was honest enough to admit that war could be stirring.

“All men who feel any power of joy in battle know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart,” he wrote.

Yet, this saber-rattler was also a master diplomat, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for helping to resolve the Russo-Japanese conflict.

In at least one way, Roosevelt is closer to Obama. A prolific author who also penned more than 100,000 letters, Teddy wrote 15 books by his 40th birthday. Obama got his start as an author, and shows a literary flair rare among politicians.

On race, Roosevelt was a man of his time, sharing some of the more absurd anthropological notions of the day.

Yes, he brought the wrath of the South on him by hosting the black leader Booker T. Washington in the White House. Yet it was a different Roosevelt who wrote his friend Owen Wister on the question of what to do about “the negroes” in 1906.

“I entirely agree with you that as a race in the mass they are inferior to the whites,” he wrote. But he added, “I do not know a white man in the south who is as good a man as Booker Washington today.”

The John McCain of old — who stood up to his party’s nasty demagogues, fought special interests and embodied the word maverick — was someone Roosevelt might admire.

The John McCain who ran a Paris Hilton ad, mocked Obama for inspiring people abroad and has proposed nothing to right the ship of economic inequality would be his fierce opponent.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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How Stupid Will We Be? Try Afghanistan As Vietnam Redux!

If The Hopester and The Geezer want to get into a drillin' contest, there won't be massive casualties. However, if The Hopester and The Geezer both want to escalate the Afghan confilct into another Vietnam disaster, that would be stupid. However, neither The Hopester nor The Geezer has demonstrated a willingness to go against stupidity. With the legacy of 9/11, the two presumptive nominees must be hawkish on terrorism. However, as Bartle Breese Bull (a character out of a Dickens novel?) correctly notes: the perpetrators for the "planes plot" of Al-Qaeda were trained in Jeb Bush's Florida, not in Afghanistan. If we escalate the war in Afghanistan, we will be fighting the wrong war in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. If this is (fair & balanced) déjà vu all over again, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Wrong Force for the ‘Right War’
By Bartle Breese Bull

Barack Obama and John McCain have plenty of disagreements, but one thing they are united on is promising a troop surge in Afghanistan. Senator McCain wants to move troops to Afghanistan from the Middle East, conditional on continued progress in Iraq. Senator Obama goes much further, arguing that we should have sent last year’s surge to Afghanistan, not Iraq, that Afghanistan is the “central front” and that we must rebuild Afghanistan from the bottom up along the lines of the Marshall Plan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is on board, too. He has endorsed a $20 billion plan to increase substantially the size of Afghanistan’s army, as well as the role and numbers of Western troops there to aid it. Polls show that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with the idea of an Afghan surge. A recent Time magazine cover anointed the fighting there as “The Right War.”

But what are the real prospects for turning fractious, impoverished Afghanistan into an orderly and prosperous nation and a potential ally of the United States? What true American interests are being insufficiently advanced or defended in its remote deserts and mountains? And even if these interests are really so broad, are they deliverable at an acceptable price? The answers to these questions put the wisdom of an Afghan surge into great question.

Destroying the Taliban regime after 9/11 was just and rational. And it was done in an effective and proportionate manner: over just six weeks in late 2001, with several hundred American special operatives on the ground, American air support and our allies in the Northern Alliance.

Since then, however, the mission has grown. Today there are 71,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, yet things are getting ever worse. There were 10 times as many armed attacks on international troops and civilian contractors in 2007 as there were in 2004. Every other measure of violence, from roadside bombs to suicide bombers, is also up dramatically. Our principal ally at the beginning of the war, the Northern Alliance, controlled more of the country at the end of 2001 than President Hamid Karzai, our current principal ally, effectively controls today.

The United States must certainly punish those who attack it and those who give sanctuary to such people. This is why the Afghan war has always had popular support. But our initial goals — dethroning the Taliban and disrupting Al Qaeda — have been as thoroughly accomplished as is possible given the porous frontier that Afghanistan shares with Pakistan.

Thus the creeping mission in Afghanistan has fed on a perception of four further American interests: the denial of sanctuary to global terrorists; the projection of American power in a sensitive part of the world; support for modernity in the global struggle for the Muslim mind; and cutting heroin exports. Each needs careful reconsideration.

Denying sanctuary to terrorists — in Afghanistan and everywhere else — is undoubtedly an American interest of the first order. Accomplishing it, however, requires neither the conquest of large swathes of Afghan territory nor a troop surge there — nor even maintaining the number of troops NATO has in Afghanistan today. Counterterrorism is not about occupation. It centers on combining intelligence with specialized military capabilities.

While the Taliban is certainly regaining strength, it could provide Al Qaeda with a true safe harbor only if its troops retake Kabul. But they have little hope of returning to power as long as we train the Afghan Army, support an Afghan state generously in other ways and maintain our intelligence and surgical strike capacities.

Besides, even if the Taliban were to return to power and give Al Qaeda the sorts of safe havens it enjoyed in Afghanistan in 2001, this would probably make little difference in America’s security. Rory Stewart, a former British foreign ministry official in Afghanistan and Iraq who now manages a nongovernmental group in Kabul, argues that the existence there of “Quantico-style” terrorist facilities teaching primitive insurgency infantry tactics had little to do with 9/11. “You don’t need to go to Afghanistan to learn how to use a box cutter,” Stewart has told me. “And Afghanistan is not a good place for flight school.”

One could argue that the key Al Qaeda training for 9/11 occurred not in the Taliban’s Afghanistan but in Jeb Bush’s Florida. And in terms of terrorist planning, 9/11 would have been better avoided with an occupation of Hamburg, where most of the essential plotting for the attack occurred.

In any case, American counterterrorism interests in Afghanistan appear to argue for something far more restrained than our current commitment there, maybe 20,000 Western troops maximum. In the long run, it needs to be seen as the remote, poor and ungovernable country it is, albeit one with a history of ties to Al Qaeda and located next door to Osama bin Laden’s current base of operations, Pakistan. Still, a very light American presence operating through embassies and aid organizations should be able to collect the intelligence needed to allow special forces to eliminate terrorist threats as they appear.

So much for counterterrorism. What about the second reason given for expanding our presence: projecting American power in an unstable area? Yes, maintaining a substantial armed presence in a corner of the world that borders Pakistan and Iran (and, barely, China) is undoubtedly valuable. But all that is needed to achieve this is an airfield at our disposal, enough special forces troops nearby to achieve limited military goals and a complaisant government in Kabul. Besides, it is unclear why Afghanistan is the necessary partner in this; the United States already has safer, less expensive and strategically more important basing arrangements elsewhere in inner Asia, as in Uzbekistan and Mongolia.

As for the broader struggle toward a modern and healthy Islam, Afghanistan’s global importance is negligible. It is a backwater of the Muslim faith. The Prophet Muhammad and his successors did not conquer or proclaim there. No great Islamic civilization, such as the Baghdad caliphate, was based there. Unlike Iraq, no great saints of Shiism were martyred or buried there. Defeating Wahhabist Sunnism in its Taliban variant is of very little symbolic value.

The last argument for expanding this Afghan war — stopping the poppy growing — is equally weak. Neither presidential candidate has mentioned heroin use as a pressing domestic issue, and there is even less reason it should be a major international one. In any case, our demand for heroin is not the fault of the Afghan peasants who would take the financial hit for our interdiction efforts. Liberal democracies cannot win counterinsurgencies against the wills of local populations, and denying a livelihood to the poor farmers of southern and eastern Afghanistan is no way to persuade Afghans to our side.

For those who remain unconvinced that anything short of ambitiously remaking Afghanistan would imperil America’s basic interests, here’s the big question: What sort of commitment are you willing to make? Dan McNeil, the American general who was NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan until he left in June, said shortly before concluding his tour that according to current American counterinsurgency doctrine, a successful occupation of Afghanistan, which is larger, more complex, more populous and very much less governable than Iraq, would require 400,000 troops.

How many of them would be killed? Except for the initial invasion and the isolated flare-ups in places like Falluja in 2005, Iraq has not been a “hot” war, but a slow-running insurgency. Were we to attempt to pacify all of Afghanistan, on the other hand, however, it would be nothing but heat, as Russia and Britain before us have discovered to their great cost. We’re already seeing higher death rates for our troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Episodes like the successful escape by more than 1,000 prisoners from a jail in Kandahar in June, or the overrunning of an American outpost by militants near Wanat in July, in which nine Americans were killed and 15 were wounded, have never occurred in Iraq.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a great tactical success and the correct strategic move. Yet since then it seems as if the United States has been trying to turn the conflict into the Vietnam War of the early 21st century. Escalating in Afghanistan to “must-win” status means, according to General McNeil’s estimate, deploying three times as many troops as were sent to Iraq at the height of the surge. If Americans really believe — as Senator Obama in particular argues — that Afghanistan is the right war and a place appropriate for Iraq-style nation-building, then they must understand both the cost involved and the remote likelihood of success.

[Bartle Breese Bull, the International Editor of Prospect magazine, has written a history of Iraq: Paradise Lost: In Search of Civilisation in the Fertile Crescent (forthcoming). Bull graduated from Harvard in 1993 and took an MBA at Columbia in 2000. At Harvard, he was an Editor of the Harvard Crimson, a daily newspaper.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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