Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Georgia Lit by the Warm Interventionist Glow

Posted on Monday, August 09 @ 17:15:00 EDT by CDeliso

In an escalating situation made more bizarre by its abruptness, provocations continued in the Caucasus today with the Russians charging Georgia over an alleged armed attack on the Duma Vice-Speaker, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

According to MosNews, the Georgian military fired from a ship, targeting the “ultranationalist” politician as he was heading from the coastal town of Anapa on his way to Sochi (both in Russia), before continuing on to his vacation getaway in Abkhazia. Almost simultaneously, a Georgian parliamentarian accused Moscow of a plot to bump off its own man in South Ossetia, and then blame it on the Georgians.

And Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, also today condemned alleged Russian invasions of Georgia’s airspace as “…serious violations of all international rules.”

A very strange diplomatic phenomenon has been going on in recent weeks, which has seen the Tbilisi government’s vocal and belligerent threats followed almost instantly by conciliatory statements and talks of dialogue and peaceful resolutions. And it might all just blow over into nothing but more sound and fury, were not outsiders so interested in crafting its portent.

Adding to the ambivalence, Georgian Defense Minister Giorgi Baramidze said that, aside from the hot tempers and several outstanding grievances with Russia, “…95% of our strategic interests coincide.” He also added that, despite Saakashvili’s tough talk on Abkhazia, Tbilisi is not pushing to expedite the withdrawal of Russian military bases anytime soon. Yet at the same time he somewhat condescendingly dismissed Moscow’s concerns by saying that “…Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not worth spoiling Russia’s relations with Georgia.”

And, even as Georgia threatens to fire on ships bound for Abkhazia, and orders new customs screening measures against them, its leader also says, “…certainly, the last thing we want is some kind of confrontation. That’s exactly something that they would like to impose on us because they think now we’re so vulnerable.”

Vulnerable? Actually, everyone knows that Georgia has never been stronger. Saakashvili’s comments came just moments after meeting with Colin Powell in Washington last week. The American authorities (for now at least) have maintained their love affair with the Columbia Law grad Saakashvili, and continue to back him. After last week’s meeting, Powell chimed in by saying that the US sincerely wants to “…remove tensions and the propensity for provocation and get back to dialogue.” In fact, the US has imposed itself as peacemaker in an altercation it is probably surreptitiously sponsoring.

Saakashvili has indeed relished in evocative patriotism of a kind that has sunk more than one Balkan politician’s boat in the past. Take what he said about Abkhazia after meeting US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice last week:

“…territory impregnated with the blood of Georgians is not a place for chaise lounges of Russian so-called tourists… [I doubt] that people who visit Abkhazia by ship without notifying the Georgian authorities really are tourists.”

One marvels at how the untested new president Saakashvili could have upped the ante so considerably in such a short period, unless he feels sure of American backing. That a small country commanding a weak military feels it can play chicken with Vladimir Putin is inconceivable. However, though speaking loudly while carrying a small stick has never been much of a recipe for success, Saakashvili seems well assured. Perhaps last week’s meetings with top-level officials such as Rice, Powell and Donald Rumsfeld had something to do with that.

While Russia blusters that it will defend its citizens if need be, so far it seems the American side is winning- and in two ways. The first victory was when Saakashvili got his wish, an enlarged number of OSCE military observers to put on the Ossetian border – to the great displeasure of Russian and its client statelet, South Ossetia.

Second of all, the foreign media has by and large been sympathetic to Saakashvili. Despite occasional caveats, media friends of American empire of greater or lesser degrees of conviction have been fairly unanimous in their praise for the new Georgian president, their condemnation of Russia, and their justification (or at least toleration) of Georgian militarism.

One recent example was the New York Times, which got to go on a boat ride with the Georgian Coast Guard last week, and spoke of the Georgian president gently “shepherding” his people towards “reunification.”

But the goal was stated most bluntly today in the empire-friendly Transitions Online, which ran an editorial by the Economist’s Robert Cottrell (incidentally also a TOL board member), in which the author recycled his description of South Ossetia as “a smuggling racket with a large piece of land attached,” while blustering that it’s high time “to challenge Russia.” He was referring, specifically, to the “frozen conflicts” in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the Moldova-Transdniester issue. According to Cottrell, in these heady times in which we live, the West is blessed by having a friend such as Mr. Saakashvili, who

“…has the charm and energy of youth, the advantage of good English, and a clear commitment to liberal democracy, which he proposes to apply to the whole of his country. His arrival on the scene, his popularity, and his policies offer living proof that things can go right in the southern Caucasus. That matters a lot to foreign policymakers, who need to believe that success is at least possible before they get involved in any problem.”

“The charm and energy of youth?” Huh? It’s unimaginable that this sort of sentence (which unfortunately appears all too often in this business) could be recited out loud in all seriousness by their authors. This is of course somewhat paradoxical, since just these kinds of writers tend to take themselves way too seriously anyway.

Yet even by British standards of rhetoric, this is embarrassing. And not only that, it is disingenuous to a fault. Even if Saakashvili is all of the things the writer claims, it is a bald-faced lie to claim that the West waited until after his election to assess his values when they helped install him in the first place, for Christ’s sake (unless they believe that somehow roses grow in the winter in Georgia).

This is the main problem with such interventionist prose: it depicts the West as an altruistic, uninvolved third party that merely reacts, as a similarly angelic infant would, to foreign stimuli it judges to be either pleasant or unpleasant – and only after that experience deciding whether to chew or spit.

The second problem with such rhetoric is that in panegyrizing its chosen pawns, the West at once sets their images at heights hopelessly unattainable, which dialectically hastens their eventual downfall, while also suppressing whatever shortcomings they and their regime may happen to have. This is neither good for the leaders themselves nor for their countries. Claiming that any one person or group has a lock on liberal values and democracy, and therefore the rest should be ignored, is itself fundamentally undemocratic.

Yet even those of us who wish the best for peace and stability and the future of Georgia should not shrink from confronting the contradictions that linger behind the encomiastic façade. Bravery and dedication to the truth are needed for a state’s success, not ‘popularity’ and ‘the charm and energy of youth.’

Yes, under Shevardnadze, the media was controlled by state interests and journalists were intimidated regularly. Yet this practice has not just gone away. Ever since the ‘Rose Revolution,’ the Georgian media has been made aware of where the line is and why it’s best not to cross it. This has been illustrated by a number of cases, the most recent being a police raid in July on independent weekly newspaper The Georgian Times. The newspaper’s cause is now being championed by the Austria-based International Press Institute (IPI), which states:

“…finance police officers raided the Tbilisi office of The Georgian Times on 14 July without a proper search warrant in order to confiscate accounting documents of the Georgian Times Media Holding. The police officers involved claimed there had been financial irregularities at the company.

Responding to this allegation, The Georgian Times' management maintains that the raid, which briefly halted work at the newspaper, is part of a deliberate campaign to exert pressure on the newspaper.

The weekly recently published a series of articles questioning the origin of assets belonging to the Tbilisi chief prosecutor, Valery Grigalashvili. In a 14 July statement, The Georgian Times wrote that in private conversations with the newspaper staff, Grigalashvili said he would force the newspaper to close, if it did not stop publishing material about him.”

Time will tell if Saakashvili’s promised reforms materialize and if Georgia is really heading for a vibrant new period of national greatness. He just might do it. Or, he might just manage to take people’s minds off of their own economic misery and shoddy infrastructure by resorting to cheap nationalism and “conflict management.”

Either way, that is – or should be – his own battle to win or lose. The real problem is with the interventionist press and politicians from the West, who it seems cannot live without telling people in faraway places what to do, and generating ever-more-comprehensive ‘final solutions.’ Take Cottrell’s rousing conclusion:

“…The West should tell Putin, directly and preferably publicly, that Russia’s proclamations against crime and terrorism and secessionism elsewhere in the world cannot be taken seriously as long as Russia goes on sponsoring criminal regimes that undermine regional security and cripple legitimate governments in its own back yard.

… The West needs to put the case in exactly those blunt terms if it wants to make Russia shift its position. Untruth and evasion are an integral part of Russian foreign policy. Challenging those untruths and evasions is the necessary first step toward changing the realities they obscure.”

One does not need to be especially interested in either Russia or Georgia to wonder if these last two sentences apply at least equally to America’s regime as they do to Russia’s; if the doctor is not at least as diseased as the patient.


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