The ideological battle lines have been drawn. On the Right is the usual multiplicity of opinions about the Russian invasion of Georgia and the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the various possible U.S. responses to it. On the Left is the usual lockstep agreement that this is all George Bush’s fault, because of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, and the Russians are just doing what anyone would do when threatened by American imperialism.
Do they really believe that invading Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban and invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein, were the moral equivalent of invading Georgia to get rid of its democratically elected government, the same thing as the intimidation of the other nations bordering Russia? Is the entire concept of there being such a thing in the universe as good guys and bad guys rendered invalid, once and for all, by postmodernism?
I’m not saying that mistakes have not been made. I’m not saying that the independent nation status of Kosovo is an unalloyed good. I am saying that George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, and the United States of America and Russia, are not peas in a pod. There is a difference. There is still a role for discrimination among alternative realities.
Barack Obama and the Democratic Party seem to be making that moral equivalence. John McCain knows better. Kick Russia out of the G8? Sure, why not? They didn’t belong there in the first place. Block Russia from becoming a member of the World Trade Organization? Absolutely. Form an organization of democratic nations to parallel the U.N.? Yes, I’m in favor of that.
Make Georgia a member of NATO? I don’t know about that. I would hopefully like to have the members of NATO be willing and capable of allocating sufficient resources to their military defense to be of some use. But then, by those criteria, we would have to boot most of Europe out of NATO. NATO has become almost as irrelevant as the U.N. As far as military and moral force (are they separable?) are concerned, in the West there is only the United States.
Here is a diatribe from that notorious neocon, Zbigniew Brezezinski. Of course he must be forgiven, having had the unfortunate experience of actually living under Russia’s benevolent boot.
The system administrator I hired at sfgate.com, when I was Director of Technology there, Sergey, a brilliant guy, was a Russian from Latvia. He served in the Russian Army. He spoke Latvian and Russian. He was born in Latvia, grew up there, and now, after sojourns in San Francisco and Amsterdam, is back there again. The Latvians don’t like the large Russian population that still lives there. Sergey told me about the big parade in Riga, his home town, where the Latvian Nazi collaborators marched. Back in the day, the Latvians welcomed the Germans as liberators from the Russians, and they still honor the Nazis. The Jews weren’t too popular in Latvia either. It’s a complicated, dare I say nuanced, business. The National Socialists are a distant, buried memory in Germany, but the Russians are as bad as they ever were.
Hard to know what to do about Georgia, eh? With just 5% of the world population, the US seems to have its military hands full at the moment. It can issue demands, I guess, and make diplomatic and economic threats, which it has done, but it’s obviously not going to commit soldiers there no matter what happens, and everybody knows it. I suppose Americans will be reading Wikipedia to learn what and where in the world this Georgia is and what the conflict is about, crisis being just about the only incentive to study geography for the average Joe. There is always bombing, I suppose; maybe we can find something to bomb.