Keep It Simple, Stupid

I always get some criticism when I look at a conflict someplace in the world, consider the arguments of both sides, and decide that there aren't any good guys in the fight. There's something in American thinking that requires every fight to be a fight of good against evil. We choose sides, cast the conflict in incredibly simplistic terms, and decide that the team we're backing isn't just faultless, but incapable of wrong. For a long-standing example of this, look at the popular conception of Israel vs. the Palestinians. Israel -- despite consistently damning reports by Amnesty International -- is practically angelic in the average American's mind.

These good guy/bad guy narratives have seemed to spring up overnight in recent history. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait supposedly came out of nowhere. But the truth is that Kuwaitis had been stealing Iraqi oil through "slant drilling" at the Iraqi border. While no one would argue that Hussein's actions weren't excessive, only those who don't know the facts would say they were unprovoked -- which, given the sorry state of our media, would be pretty much everyone. The invasion of Kuwait was never presented as a dictator vs. thieves. For the home audience, it was bad guy vs. good guys.

And we're seeing the same thing in the Russo-Georgian crisis. There aren't any good guys there, no one we should root for on merely moral grounds. In the conflict, there's no real case to make for the legality of Russia's invasion -- it's pretty much unquestionably a crime. But another question is whether Georgia deserves to be seen as heroic. Not every victim of a crime is a solid citizen; criminal on criminal violence is awfully commonplace.



For background, we can turn to Matt Rothschild in The Progressive. The title tells you where he's going with this -- "No Good Guys in Russia-Georgia War":

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was reckless to send in the military to subdue the Russian-leaning province of South Ossetia on Friday.

And Russia, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, responded with unnecessary force.

As in most modern conflicts, it is civilians who bear the brunt. There have been reports of more than 2,000 civilians killed already. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged Russia and Georgia not to fire on civilians, and to give them safe passage. Amnesty International warns that some of the attacks may already have constituted war crimes.

Russia does not have a legitimate claim here. It brutally subdued Chechnya, which was trying to secede from Russia. Georgia was trying to subdue a restive South Ossetia. What’s the difference?

Georgia has been accused of shelling S. Ossetia in the past and of using an abusive police force to put down dissent and unrest. But they've become the good guys in this conflict, because Russia is a convenient bad guy. No history of Georgian abuse is reported, because it would spoil the good guy/bad guy narrative. Just as the Kuwaitis were the lovely, peace-loving, completely blameless victims of an attack by a madman, so Georgians are like freakin' Black Sea Quakers, living humble rustic lives in the shadow of evil.

Of course, the US shares some blame here. Our national belief that every continent is our backyard and that no pie is complete without our finger in it has made what would be a regional eruption an international crisis. Rothschild again:

When Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington had a great opportunity to broker a global peace with only country, Russia, still capable of destroying the United States.

Bush Sr. seemed to recognize this, and pledged in 1991 not to try to incorporate the Eastern bloc nations and the former Soviet republics that border Eastern Europe right into NATO’s sphere.

But Clinton reneged on that pledge, and George Jr. has done everything in his power to further the incorporation process and to encircle and humiliate Russia.

Russia is beginning to see itself as boxed in by NATO. We're close to closing a deal on arming Poland with missiles and Ukraine wants in on the action. Imagine the situation reversed -- nations all around the US are signing treaties with Russia and "missile defense" systems are placed in Canada and Mexico. Think that'd go over real well?

Russia saw the need -- real or imagined is irrelevant at this point -- to deal with Georgia and S. Ossetia before Georgia entered NATO. As I say, Russia's action was unquestionably illegal. But it was also fairly predictable.

"But does Russia's behavior cause Obama to rethink reliance on 'soft power' -- dialogue, disapproval, diplomacy, economic carrots and sticks -- which Putin considers almost an oxymoron?" asks columnist George Will. "Does Russia's resort to military coercion, and its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, cause Obama to revise his resistance to missile defense?" As is so often the case, Will proves his reputation as a brainiac is unearned. It's 'soft power' that's currently defusing this situation -- which, by the way, I can almost guarantee will be forgotten by the wandering American attention span within a year.

The French used diplomacy to broker a peace deal. Meanwhile, the American right was busy accusing Russia of returning to either Empire or the Soviet era, depending on which panicky nut you asked. While our government was busy trying to get us on board with a new Cold War, another nation was busy doing something constructive. Where McCain borrows Hillary Clinton's 3 A.M. phone call argument against Obama, it was the French who actually answered that call, not the US. Whether or not their efforts will have any lasting result is an open question, but anyone who thinks American bluster accomplished anything at all just hasn't been paying attention.

But that's all too complicated. The US government and media believes that every conflict must be presented as Superman vs. Lex Luthor -- a simplified version of right and wrong where nations take actions for no reason other than to be evil. There must always be a good guy and a bad guy. If that narrative isn't exactly true, it will be made true by constant repetition.

-Wisco

The [Your Name Here] Candidate

The big foreign policy expert in the 2008 presidential race is John McCain... Right? Of course, the problem with putting yourself across as an expert means that people are going to expect you to know what you're talking about. So, when the going gets tough, the tough get going -- to Wikipedia.

Taegan Goddard reports that Mr. Big Fancy Foreign Policy Expert seems to have turned to the open source encyclopedia to get the skinny on Georgia in the Russo-Georgian crisis. "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today [August 11] on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia," Goddard writes at his Congressional Quarterly blog. "Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia."

Of course, Team McCain denies any Wiki-plagiarism. They claimed it was entirely coincidental. "Nonetheless, at least two political science professors have weighed in saying the similarities are more than coincidental and wouldn't be tolerated from their own students," writes Goddard.

It may be Matthew Yglesias who had the best reaction to the McCain copy-and-paste job; "Given that McCain, by his own admission, can't use the internet it's a bit of an ironic situation though perhaps it counts as progress of some sort."

Isn't that nice? McCain's learning to use the google.



The odd thing about all of this is that Team McCain has a Georgia expert on board. How do we know that? Because Georgia pays this McCainiac to be an American expert on Georgia. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is a paid lobbyist for Georgia. And that pro-Georgian lobbying seems to be influencing McCain's stand on the issue.

A CNN piece titled " McCain pushes hard line against Russia; aides attack Obama" gives a perfect example of how Scheunemann's expertise is being used by Team McCain:

On Tuesday, Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, attacked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's response to the situation in Georgia, saying his experience with the region amounted to a handful of paper statements.

On the other hand, McCain's experience with Georgia runs deep, Scheunemann said, noting that McCain and the Georgian president were friends.

"There's a depth of knowledge, a breadth of knowledge and an extent of historical experience that doesn't compare between the two on Russia policy," Scheunemann said. "You can't compare a 15-year historical record to three or four statements over the course of 15 months."

Of course, this is CNN -- that paragon of lazy American journalism -- so the piece doesn't mention the inconvenient fact that Scheunemann is an agent of a foreign government that goes by the name of "Georgia." It also fails to note that McCain is such a good, dear friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that he can't even pronounce the man's name.

McCain's obvious ignorance of Georgia doesn't stop him from making insane claims about the crisis -- claims that put Russia in the worst possible light.

Boston Globe:

Republican John McCain yesterday [Aug. 13] phoned Georgia's president to tell him that Americans are supporting his "brave little nation" against Russia's military attacks -- and blasted Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom he accused of wanting to restore the czarist empire.

In fact, McCain's defense of Georgia and bellicosity toward Russia is so vigorous that he's wound up saying really, really stupid and hypocritical things about the crisis. Just yesterday, McCain told reporters at a press conference, "In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations."

No, really. I can prove it. There's video.

But if Scheunemann being on the Georgian payroll (a blatant conflict of interest at this point) is influencing McCain's stand on the conflict, you have to wonder what other issues members of Team McCain are being paid to take. I've written before that "McCain is a candidate openly for sale."

And his campaign team is for hire. A new analysis by the Public Campaign Action Fund found that McCain campaign aides and fundraisers have earned nearly $1 billion as lobbyists over the last decade.

"The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they’ll rely on him," said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch. "In the ‘you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours’ world of Washington, $931 million gets the special interests the best government money can buy. But just think of the payday these lobbyists might expect in a McCain Administration."

With that much special interest support, McCain's positions could almost be safely assumed to come straight out of the wallets of nations and industries. If Scheunemann's any indication, we can take comfort in the fact that they aren't very good at it.

When you have to turn to Wikipedia to get background on your own client, you really haven't done your homework. Of course, it makes you wonder how much homework they've done on anything else.

Maybe McCain should turn to Wikipedia more often. Then he'd know the difference between Sunni and Shia, Iran and al Qaeda, or that Pakistan doesn't border Iraq. Until Mr. Foreign Policy Expert figures these sorts of things out, the nations that bought him should ask for their money back.

-Wisco

Fighting Russia Over a Missile System That Doesn't Work

Condoleezza Rice is in Moscow today, trying to ease relations between Russia and the US.

Associated Press:

"I don't throw around terms like 'new Cold War,'" Rice said on her way to Moscow for a visit amid growing tensions underlined by President Vladimir Putin's increasing criticism of the United States. "It is a big, complicated relationship, but it is not one that is anything like the implacable hostility" that clouded ties between the United States and the Soviet Union.

"It is not an easy time in the relationship, but it is also not, I think, a time in which cataclysmic things are affecting the relationship or catastrophic things are happening in the relationship," Rice told reporters aboard her plane. "But it is critically important to use this time to enhance those things that are going well and to work on those things that are not going well."

Last week, in a speech commemorating the defeat of the nazis, Putin alluded to the US while denouncing it for "disrespect for human life, claims to global exclusiveness and dictate, just as it was in the time of the Third Reich." When someone thinks you're like the freakin' nazis, things aren't really going very well.

The Iraq war has a lot to do with this, but it's mostly US plans to place missile defense systems in NATO countries. Not surprisingly, Putin's not a big fan of parking these systems on his borders.

"The Russian side does not believe American statements that these ballistic missile facilities will not be directed against Russia, but are a safeguard against rogue nations which seek nuclear weapons and missile technology to attack the United States and their allies," Voice of America quotes Yevgeni Volk of the Heritage Foundation in Moscow as saying. "So, I believe both sides can hardly find common ground, because the perceptions of ballistic missiles in Europe are quite different."

When you're getting this sort of analysis from Heritage Foundation flack, it means things are pretty bad. Russia's trust in the Bush administration is parallel to everyone else's in the world -- he doesn't trust them any farther than he can throw them. Russia also has a closer relationship with Iran than the US does, so the Bush hypocrisy of freaking out about Iran getting nukes while sprinkling Europe with weapons systems probably isn't lost on him.

But here's the real fun part -- the systems don't work. Although Rice says she doesn't like to use the term 'cold war' here, there's little doubt that this is one of the risks. So why on Earth are we risking it to place systems that don't actually work?

Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate after yet another failed missile defense test back in February:

A question for the overseers in Congress: Is it time now for a serious look at this program? Missile defense consumed $10.7 billion of this year's military budget -- far more than any other weapon system. About $80 billion has been spent on it since Ronald Reagan stepped up research and development for the mission 20 years ago. Another $80 billion is scheduled to be spent before the decade is out. It may be time to ask: Why?

The question is even more pressing now. We've got Russia comparing the US to nazis and Rice denying that we're on the cusp of a new cold war (and you know what a Bushie denial means) -- why the hell are we doing all of this for something that has failed and failed and failed? Why are we planning to blow a total of $160 billion on this reaganite fantasy on one hand and haggling about funding war in Iraq on the other? If we can afford to throw funding down the missile defense rathole, then we've got money to burn -- literally. We might as well launch semi trailers filled with quarters at the missiles of rogue nations. Not only wouldn't it any less effective, it's probably be cheaper.

Donald Rumsfeld once justified deploying the failed missile defense systems as being better than nothing. The problem with this reasoning is that something that doesn't work is nothing -- no one argues that a bridge that only goes halfway across the river is better than no bridge at all. Half a bridge is no bridge at all.

Here's an offer I've made before -- give me a mere $10 million a year and I'll sit out in my backyard with a shotgun. If I see a missile, I'll take a whack at it. It's just as effective and it's one helluva lot cheaper. It might freak out my neighbors a little, but I can guarantee that Putin won't have a problem with it.

Think about it; what I'm proposing is no less ridiculous than what the missile defense hawks plan to do. In fact, their plan is more ridiculous in that it's much more expensive, in more ways than one. It's costing us an amazing amount of money and it's costing us global goodwill at a time when we need it. I don't really see the logic behind a defensive system that doesn't defend and only increases enmity. It seems to me that it's worse than nothing.

Still, if you think that spending tens of billions on a system that doesn't work and only antagonizes other nations is a good deal, I've got half a bridge to sell you.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; military; diplomacy; Condoleezza Rice; Russia; Missile defense doesn't work, cost billions in tax dollars, and pisses everyone off -- it's no surprise Bush is a fan