Bloodless Coup in Georgia? 11/22/03--Following Georgia.

It is a fair question...

IF Obama was President right now, how would he handle the situation?

Since he wants to be President, he should tell all of us what he would do to defuse the situation.

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nimh wrote:

Lash wrote:
That's what they say is happening...and the Ukraine is challenging Russia re: use of their water space...

Such a scary chess game...every move so potentially dangerous.

Talk about chilling, have you seen Putin's response? I dont have a TV here, but this video popped up on Google News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfA5XfxQOPw

Doesnt sound like the man will back down any time soon. But at least as worrying, I mean: "As we all know, Saddam Hussein was hanged for burning down several Shi'ite villages"?

That's, a) some bluster - I mean, come on, the whole idea that Saakashvili is worse than Saddam; this man is not in the mood for reasonable talks or negotiations, obviously; and b) provides a startling look inside his mind - it's obvious he thought the whole outrage over Saddam's crimes was a bunch of exaggerated wussiness, and doesnt see the big deal about someone ruling like he did (which of course involved a whole lot more than just "burning down several villages").

I know, nimh---I felt cold when I heard him so easily pop off that comparison. Today, the news seems much better. Hope to put a cork in this soon....but i am interested in revisiting this issue when the dust settles. I think Saakashvili made a very bold move, hoping to capitalize and severely miscalculated....but I'm going to pieces of info and hunches. He may be more to blame than we'd like to think. A lot of what you said strengthened that impression.

I also think McC made headway here, and Obama dropped the ball.

I think McC can't pronounce the name, but knows who Saakashvili's banging... Laughing

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WWOD?

Well, he might vote 'Present'.

Or he might stick his foot in his mouth to cover his lack of knowledge.

Quote:

Mention Georgia a few days ago, and most of us would have thought of the state evoked so sweetly in "Georgia on My Mind," the classic tune sung by Ray Charles. Very few of us had heard of the South Ossetia province of Georgia, the nation with the misfortune to have Russia as its neighbor, until war broke out last week.

Like Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait and other unfamiliar places before, Ossetia reminds us that a small, remote corner of the globe can explode into an international crisis. One who was up to speed on Georgia and the menace it faced from Russia was veteran Sen. John McCain. He had visited the Caucasian nation three times in a dozen years. When fighting erupted, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate got on the phone to gather details and issued a statement Friday summarizing the situation, tagging Russia as the aggressor and demanding it withdraw its forces from the sovereign territory of Georgia.

It took first-term Sen. Barack Obama three tries to get it right. Headed for a vacation in Hawaii, the presumed Democratic candidate for commander in chief issued an even-handed statement, urging restraint by both sides. Later Friday, he again called for mutual restraint but blamed Russia for the fighting. The next day his language finally caught up with toughness of McCain's.

Making matters worse, Obama's staff focused on a McCain aide who had served as a lobbyist for Georgia, charging it showed McCain was "ensconced in a lobbyist culture." Obama's campaign came off as injecting petty partisan politics into an international crisis. This was not a serious response on behalf a man who aspires to be the leader of the Free World. After all, what's so bad about representing a small former Soviet republic struggling to remake itself as a Western-style democracy

http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/1102552,CST-EDT-hunt12.article

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mysteryman wrote:

It is a fair question...

IF Obama was President right now, how would he handle the situation?

Since he wants to be President, he should tell all of us what he would do to defuse the situation.

If you want to have a discussion about "what would Obama do", why not start a thread about it. Obama isn't President. He has no particular influence on the situation. Same for McCain.

Using a situation where several thousand people got killed, and tens of thousands have lost their home to score cheap political points is just pathetic.

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mysteryman wrote:

It is a fair question...

IF Obama was President right now, how would he handle the situation?

Since he wants to be President, he should tell all of us what he would do to defuse the situation.

Thank you! Cool

We really can't expect Democrats to allow Bush to do anything about the situation
so we should look at how the anointed one will bring hope and change to the region.

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Lash wrote:

I think Saakashvili made a very bold move, hoping to capitalize and severely miscalculated....

I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. People are celebrating the Georgian victory in Tbilisi. If Saakashvili can pass this off as a victory of David vs. the Russian Goliath, and if he manages to stay in office even though the Russians obviously want to see him gone, Georgia may very well profit from his move. The international community seems to be steadfast on the issue of territorial integrity of Georgia. Even if Abkhazia and South Ossetia become, once again, autonomous regions, I think there's at least the possibility of having the current Ossetian/Georgian/Russian "peacekeeping" forces replaced by UN forces. Also, reading between the lines of Jaap de Hoop Scheffer's statements, a fast track programme for Georgia to become a NATO member seems to be a realistic outcome of this whole situation.

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One thing I've been reading about that I don't remember seeing here (though I may have just missed it, apologies if so) is that Bush evidently indicated to the Georgians that the US was on their side... That if Russia did something, the US would help out militarily.

More here, for example.

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My God, was it worth the cost?

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real life wrote:

When fighting erupted, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate got on the phone to gather details and issued a statement Friday summarizing the situation, tagging Russia as the aggressor and demanding it withdraw its forces from the sovereign territory of Georgia.

And it is by no means clear that that was the correct assessment of the situation.

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RL--Russia was in the middle of doing the most damage, but they may have been finessed by Saakashvili... McC was right to call on Russia to cease...when Obama, sorta milky, made some benign "ya'll play nice now" statement...

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Lash wrote:

My God, was it worth the cost?

Neither Russians nor Georgians care a lot about the Ossetians. I think it's important for the West to realize that. The Ossetians, not the Georgians, may very well have been hit hardest by this conflict.

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OE--Thank you so much for your information. Going now...will be back tomorrow...

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Lash wrote:

RL--Russia was in the middle of doing the most damage, but they may have been finessed by Saakashvili... McC was right to call on Russia to cease...when Obama, sorta milky, made some benign "ya'll play nice now" statement...

McCain was right to call on Russia to cease. So did Obama. So did Bush. That was the right thing to do.

"Tagging Russia as the aggressor", though? Questionable.

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Say goodbye to Georgia

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old europe wrote:

Lash wrote:
RL--Russia was in the middle of doing the most damage, but they may have been finessed by Saakashvili... McC was right to call on Russia to cease...when Obama, sorta milky, made some benign "ya'll play nice now" statement...

McCain was right to call on Russia to cease. So did Obama. So did Bush. That was the right thing to do.

"Tagging Russia as the aggressor", though? Questionable.

How is it questionable?
The Georgian govt didnt invade Russia, they sent troops into their own territory.

Russia invaded Georgia on a pretense.
According to many on the left here, that is what the US did and we are called the aggressor, so why wouldnt Russia also be the aggressor?

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mysteryman wrote:

How is it questionable?
The Georgian govt didnt invade Russia, they sent troops into their own territory.

South Ossetia was an autonomous region. For a good reason. Ossetians are a different ethnic group, always have been. Ossetians fought on the side of the Czar, in past times.

South Ossetia was not simply Georgia's "own territory". There were agreements in place that limited Georgia reign over the region. De facto, South Ossetia had an own, independent government in place.

And Georgia didn't simply violate these agreements by "sending troops" into South Ossetia. They staged an aggressive military campaign. We know that Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, is almost completely destroyed. There are reports that the attack caused at least several hundred, if not as much as 2,000 deaths. More than 30,000 people have left South Ossetia. Many weren't able to bring more than the clothes they were wearing with them. Many probably lost everything they had.

Questionable.

mysteryman wrote:

Russia invaded Georgia on a pretense.

Absolutely. Russia has, reportedly, been gathering troops on the Russian side. It seems that Russia was well prepared to invade Georgia.

But, as I said earlier, the point that we don't even know the exact facts yet. To come down on one side when in reality, both parties may very well be guilty, is rather foolish.

mysteryman wrote:

According to many on the left here, that is what the US did and we are called the aggressor, so why wouldnt Russia also be the aggressor?

I didn't say that Russia wouldn't be an aggressor. But there's a lot of things that, even though true, are unwise to state. Especially when you're a politician running for US President.

Unfortunately, that's how diplomacy sometimes works: in order to achieve a situation that benefits the population, you will meet with leaders of governments that may very well have blood on their hands, and you will swallow your pride and not call them bloody murderers.

You can call Russia an aggressor or even the only aggressor in this situation if you want to do so. McCain doing so? Questionable.

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Georgia's attempt to bring South Ossetia under control has failed. President Saakashvili is counting on help from the USA-a serious miscalculation
German views

http://watchingamerica.com/News/3724/a-hand-overplayed/

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old europe wrote:

I also think that it's important for the West not to take sides - and by that I mean Saakashvili's or, alternatively, Medvedev's/Putin's side - in this conflict. At least not based on the propaganda spread by both sides.

Aren't you afraid that, in terms of the position of the West in this, you end up with Bosnia mk II?

There too, it was easy to find plenty of wrongdoing, outright war crimes too, on all sides, and a lot of observers used that as a reason to not get involved at all, and "leave them at it", so to say. The results of this passivity were devastating, as we now know.

Isn't it the job of the US President, the EU Commission, to cut through the very real complexities and ambiguities to still recognise what the greater danger or the greater crime is? In short, is it really fair to equate the violence with which Georgia tried to repossess South-Ossetia with the Russian army invading Georgia, an independent country? I mean, even aside from the spectre of precedent regarding resurgent Russia's eyes on its near abroad, which should be a real concern to Europe?

If I'm doing analogies, the Georgian action seems to me like the equivalence of Croatia's 1995 offensive to conquer back the Krajina. There's no doubt that real war crimes were committed (and have been indicted at the Yugoslav Tribunal), and half the local Serbian population fled. But the history was much the same too. With massive support from Serbia and the Yugoslav army, the Krajina Serbs had insurrected against the Croatian state, set up their own territory as Serbian vassal state, and ethnically cleansed the Croats who lived there. Then in 1995, the Croatian army moved back in, driving out most of the Serbs and bringing the expelled Croatians back in. (A good friend of mine was one of them.) Put in Russia for Serbia, South-Ossetia for the Krajina and Georgians for Croatians, and it seems to me you have much the same story, with Georgia trying a "1995". A big bloody mess, for sure. But hardly the equivalent of a superpower invading a neighbouring independent country, as Russia now did with Georgia, right?

It's tricky, for sure, to draw lines and recognize what is substantively different from which or not, in a cauldron of violent complexity. I just really don't want us to go here again (the bottom part of that post, I mean).

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sozobe wrote:

One thing I've been reading about that I don't remember seeing here (though I may have just missed it, apologies if so) is that Bush evidently indicated to the Georgians that the US was on their side... That if Russia did something, the US would help out militarily.

It was probably not wise of Bush to say so, if he did -- Lash said something earlier in response to me about not pointing things that you're not willing to use. Don't promise to stand by their side with your army if you can't live it up. But.

But a real commitment like that would actually be good. IMO. I would be very relieved if the US or NATO would make such a basic commitment to help protect Georgia against outside attacks (on the preconditions of the para below). Give Georgia NATO membership, basically -- now more than ever. Russia would be outraged, yes. But it would stop any repetition of this kind of attack on Georgia now.

The upside of that is also that it's such a huge, enormous carrot (huge enough for any realpolitiker here to instantly declare me crazy, I'm sure), that you could probably get the Georgian government, as precondition, to accept lasting autonomy - de facto independence - for South-Ossetia. Would probably even have to do the same with Abkhazia, however much justice is on the Georgian's side there in a way that it is not anywhere as clear with Ossetia (Abkhazian "independence" has really been little short of a Russia-sponsored landgrab). That would have to be the deal.

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You have been knocking the US with some justification but the EU should be involved also. I haven't seen any of the european countries threating Russia with anything but fluff. I get tired of reading about our military in Iraq, England, Germany, Israel, Korea, Phillipanes, and half of the countries in the world which my taxes go too support. If mexico decided to invade the US we probably wouldn't have enough military here to defend the US. All this projection of power by our very stupid politicians is a bunch of crap. Most countries hate us and don't want us there.

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Bloodless Coup in Georgia? 11/22/03--Following Georgia.

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