Obama and Georgia

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Squink]
It strikes me that holding someone blameless who is not blameless is dishonest. We’ve seen where such dishonesty leads in Iraq. Unless he supports the continuation of a dishonest foreign policy, McCain needs to publicly acknowledge that this is not entirely a black and white, us or them issue.
[/QUOTE]

There’s a time and a place for everything. If your daughter was dressing a little too provocatively and visiting seedy parts of town, you might take her aside and explain to her the foolishness of wearing provocative clothes and walking around alone at night.

On the other hand, if the cops come to your door and tell you your daughter has been raped, it would be a bad time to say, “Hey, she had it coming.”

Before Pearl Harbor, you could make a reasonable case that the U.S. policy in the far east was not perfect and was creating some potential problems. The day after Pearl Harbor, bringing that up as an ‘explanation’ for the attack would be seen as moral foolishness. Fifty years later, you can talk about it again.

People on the left would stop doing so much damage to their cause if they’d learn not to point out unpleasant facts at a time when the disproportionate wrong is on the other side. The day after 9/11 was not a good time to launch into a tirade on America’s failures in the Middle East.

In this case, Georgia seems to be somewhat guilty of perhaps responding too aggressively to the Soviet-instigated attacks that came from South Ossetia. But the Russian response to that was so overwhelmingly worse that assigning blame to the invadee instead of the invader while the invasion is ongoing is really not all that helpful. Right now, the Russians are in the wrong, in a big way, and Georgia is the victim.

After the conflict is settled, perhaps Georgian leaders need to be schooled a bit in the proper use of force. But right now, they need help.

As for the U.S. not able to anything - nonsense. They can’t do anything directly in a military way, but what the U.S. needs to do is apply enough pressure from enough angles that the Russians come to see their Georgian operation as a net negative. Today, for example, American warplanes are flying into Georgia bringing humanitarian aid, delivered by armed U.S. soldiers. It’s the right thing to do, and Russia has agreed to it - but there’s a message in there as well. In addition, the U.S. canceled the long-planned wargames with Russia this week, which the Russians very much wanted to help train their military. And most importantly, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a defense pact that includes interceptor missiles on Ukrainian territory and a U.S. base in the Ukraine, in exchange for providing Ukraine with better weaponry and an agreement that should Russia threaten them the U.S. will act before an invasion.

Putin’s not going to like that. His little invasion is going to start costing him in real terms. We just have to make sure the cost is higher than the benefit.

22

Sorry, I meant Poland.

23

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
There’s a time and a place for everything.
[/QUOTE]
The time and the place is before we get ourselves involved in another bloody, stupid, expensive adventure, again.
Of course, there are those who think they will profit by getting us into another bloody, stupid, expensive adventure. The more I hear from McCain on his future policies towards Russia, the more I think he’s one of them.

24

Red, you know I agree with you positionally. But Putin doesn’t requite any paint here to look like A Very Bad Guy[sup]TM[/sup]. What they’re doing in Georgia is going way above and beyond what was appropriate or required, and you know it. And now the Times On Line says

This after they said they had agreed to and implemented a cease-fire. Do you know what it means? I don’t, but it sure looks as if it means, at a bare minimum, regime change, as we so charmingly developed the term for it. If I were Saakashvili, I’d either be on a plane out or making my will. But maybe the logical end means absorbtion. No one knows except Russia, and even they may be making this up as they go along.

Mr. Moto, if I understand it correctly, there is no question that Georgia kicked this thing off by sending troops in South Ossetia, a region which by virtue of a 2006 (or 1992 - I can’t seem to determine which agreement led to the troops) agreement had been occupied by Russian troops as “peacekeepers”. It is about 1/3 Georgian, 1/3 South Ossetian (a completely different ethnic group, unrelated language and culture), and 1/3 Russian/other (also unrelated to Georgian. Or S. Ossetian. There’s a different language family in every valley around there!). The Other are now mostly Russian because Russia has been foisting Russian passports on just about anyone they could over the past couple of years, but the point is, given a population of about 140,000, Russia can without complete inaccuracy claim more than 30,000 Russian civilians in South Ossetia, and Georgia came in attacking them and the Russian soldiers stationed there as “peacekeepers.”

Should Russia have been there as peacekeepers? Hell, I don’t know! But South Ossetia has never wanted to be part of Georgia, and it has repeatedly appealed to Russia for help when they tried to break away and Georgia beat the crap out of them to prevent it. Russia mediated a settlement between Georgia and South Ossetia that allowed South Ossetia de facto autonomy, while having de jure ownership, and apparently Russian soldiers as well as South Ossetia para-military were stationed there to ward off this kind of thing from Georgia (which has happened before, but not as big). Saakashvili got elected in large part on a platform to get South Ossetia back under South Georgia’s direct control, heaven knows why. The United States has fostered this to some extent by implying that if Georgia got into trouble with Russia, we and/or NATO would back them up militarily. It hasn’t helped that McCain’s foreign affairs advisor, was until May, a registered and paid lobbyist for Georgia.

While the foreign affairs advisor to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Scheunemann was also a registered foreign agent (lobbyist) for the Republic of Georgia[5] [6]

[QUOTE=wikipedia]
On April 17, 2008, McCain spoke on the phone with Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili about Russian efforts to gain leverage over two of Georgia’s troubled provinces. That same day, McCain issued a public statement condemning Russia and expressing strong support for the Georgian position. Also on that same day, Georgia signed a new, $200,000 lobbying contract with Scheunemann’s firm, Orion Strategies. Scheunemann remained with Orion Strategies until May 15, when the McCain campaign imposed a tough new anti-lobbyist policy and he was required to separate himself from the company.[7]

In mid-July 2008, The Sunday Times linked Scheunemann to Stephen Payne, a lobbyist covertly filmed as he offered to arrange meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and others, in exchange for donations to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Payne said Scheunemann had been “working with me on my payroll for five of the last eight years.” [8]
[8]^ Daniel Foggo and Steven Swinford, “President Bush lobbyist Stephen Payne in ‘bribes’ row quits: Cash for access at the White House is under scrutiny by Congress”, The Sunday Times, July 20, 2008
[/QUOTE]

Do you honestly believe that if the United States had been in Russia’s shoes, with our citizens and soldiers being attacked by a foreign army, even though it was in another country, we wouldn’t have felt perfectly justified in going in? Not to the extent that Russia has, but to the initial extent, within the borders of South Ossetia? Because I find that inconceivable - of course we would want to go in! You would be among the loudest calling for it, and with justification. You don’t just sit around when your own people are being killed!

Unfortunately, Russia was apparently counting on Georgia doing this, and was ready to rock and roll. Most of the rest has been a pretty transparent power grab, once they tossed Georgia out of S. Ossetia ( and arguably Abkhazia, where similar conditions prevailed) and got them to agree to a cease fire.

Understand, I agree that of the two, Russia has been the main bad guy! All I’m saying is that Georgia is not entirely blameless. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Sam, the important thing about making sure that Georgia gets its share of the blame is so that Russia can go into negotiations with the idea that we (the US, NATO) are being even-handed, and not just saying Russia = bad. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make our displeasure with their actions perfectly clear, and I think that Obama has done so as the situation has developed and Russia’s actions have gotten worse and worse. But if we break off talking with them before we begin, or we go in ranting, we’ll find ourselves in a war, cold or hot, faster than you can say “Jack Robinson.” While this may be of great benefit to certain corporate interests, it is not a very good thing for the world in general.

25

I find it hilarious that Bush and McCain have both actually stated (with a straight face, mind you) that it is unacceptable for one country to invade another country for the purposes of overthrowing its government and replacing its leader.

26

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
As for the U.S. not able to anything - nonsense. They can’t do anything directly in a military way, but what the U.S. needs to do is apply enough pressure from enough angles that the Russians come to see their Georgian operation as a net negative. Today, for example, American warplanes are flying into Georgia bringing humanitarian aid, delivered by armed U.S. soldiers. It’s the right thing to do, and Russia has agreed to it - but there’s a message in there as well. In addition, the U.S. canceled the long-planned wargames with Russia this week, which the Russians very much wanted to help train their military. And most importantly, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a defense pact that includes interceptor missiles on Ukrainian territory and a U.S. base in the Ukraine, in exchange for providing Ukraine with better weaponry and an agreement that should Russia threaten them the U.S. will act before an invasion.

Putin’s not going to like that. His little invasion is going to start costing him in real terms. We just have to make sure the cost is higher than the benefit.
[/QUOTE]

I absolutely agree with the concrete steps taken thus far - the delivery of humanitarian aid, and the cancellation of the war games. Not so sure about the defense pact, but I don’t have a CIA or a State Department at my fingertips, so I’ll go along until I know more.

I also absolutely agree that we want to make his actions cost more than he thinks they were worth, or at least more than they would be worth doing again. Since we don’t know yet what he’s doing ultimately, that’s a hard assessment to make just yet. Also, even if they take Georgia, it may not be so painless to keep Georgia.

But, again, we really don’t want to get into either a hot or a cold war. This is a situation in which brains serve us better than brawn. By all means, let’s hurt them. But let’s hurt them smart. If you ask me how, I’ll tell you quite frankly that I don’t have a clue. See CIA, State Dept, etc, Lack Of At Fingertips. But I do know that it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.

Whatever is happening to Georgia right now, the only thing we’re going to be able to do about it is to send humanitarian aid. That ship sailed before we ever knew about it, and even if we hadn’t already been overextended, we would never have been able to deploy quickly enough to do anything unless we were prepared to use nukes, which would have been, er, a tad hasty. Oh, a few air strikes, I guess. But they wouldn’t have been sufficient to protect Georgia; they just would have pissed the Russians off more, and catapulted us into a war.

So we’re looking at longer time frame deterrents or punishments, however you prefer to look at it, unless they plan to roll on to Ukraine or Armenia or wherever immediately. We probably don’t have to jump into it this very minute, and a good thing, too, because beyond what we’re doing, we just don’t have all that much to jump in with. We’ll probably be playing a supporting role in this one, while the rest of NATO takes the lead, which means they get to make the calls. After all, they’re the ones who’ll be taking both the economic and the physical risks. It’s not our oil and gas the Russians can cut off, and it’s not our territory that’s at risk of having tanks roll across it.