The short, but miserable, war in South Ossetia seems to be over for the moment at least. Some not very original observations over the fold
* The decision by the Georgian government to send its troops into South Ossetia reflected at least two of the military miscalculations common to those who start wars
– belief in a quick and complete victory producing a fait accompli
– the assumption that helping a powerful ally (in this case, the US in Iraq) will call forth help when it is needed. In this case, a glance at the map ought to have been enough to show that the US could, and would, do nothing, but the error is much more common than this.
* The Russian government may seem to have triumphed, but the costs of this action will far outweigh the benefits. Among the consequences, an obvious one is the likelihood that Ukraine will be admitted to NATO sooner rather than later. But more generally, Russia has acquired a limited capacity to throw its weight around in the Caucasus at the expense of any likelihood of being treated as a friend by the rest of Europe, not to mention the US. That won’t stop them selling oil and gas, for example, but I imagine most of Russia’s customers will now be willing to offer a premium to alternative suppliers. Implicitly, that means a discount on the price received by Russia
* Virtually everything the Russian government has done here has precedents in the recent actions of the US. Of course, the precedents have been stretched, but the Bush Administration set the (meta)precedent here as well. If it weren’t tragic, it would be laughable to see Bush proclaiming that such actions were ‘unacceptable in the 21st century’.
John Quiggin 
“They are idiots.”
No, they’re cynical amoral political operators who don’t give a damn what effect their statments have abroad if they increase the chances of McCain winning in November.
Ian
You are probably right but do you really think this will help McCain? Doesn’t it just illustrate the dangers of precipitate military action? The US comedian Letterman is on TV in the background here now and he just made a joke about Bush’s plan to solve rising milk prices: invade Wisconsin. Everyone laughed. I don’t think the Republican reputation for being strong on foreign policy has much cred left.
To see the recent weekend of pointless slaughter of common humanity in geo-political strategy outcomes is one form of dispassionate,intellectual exercise. The hopeful sign, present in the periphery of commentary, was the suggestion that war crime indictments should be made. Proper trials would establish the truth of the matter and set standards for conduct that might help to prevent future occurrences, or at least establish consequences. War is part of the game of nations, based on a premise that one person’s life is more important than another’s, and seen through the lens of abstraction people become inconsequential.
Socrates, “cynical” and “amoral” don;t necessarily translate to shrewd or effective.
Especially not when George W Buch is involved.
“I believe that there is not a single topic that Jack cannot turn towrds his on-going ethnic/immigration obsession.”
He’s not the only one Michael-
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JH13Ag01.html
Food for thought for those who want to weld Hamas and Fatah into a one state solution too.
The money quote-
“There is no longer any reason to put up with the tantrums of long-redundant tribes. If 3.7 million ethnic Georgians have the right to break away from the 142 million population of the Russian Federation, why shouldn’t the 100,000 Ossetians living in Georgia break away and form their own state as well? Most of them have acquired Russian passports and want nothing to do with the Georgians. The Ossetians have spoken their variant of Persian for more than a millennium and had their own kingdom during the Middle Ages.
If the West is going to put itself at risk for 3.8 million ethnic Georgians, roughly the population of Los Angeles, or 5.4 million Tibetans, or 2 million Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, why shouldn’t Russia take risks for the South Ossetians, not to mention the 100,000 Abkhaz speakers in Georgia’s secessionist Black Sea province? Once the infinite regress of ethnic logic gets into motion, there is no good reason not to pull the world apart like taffy.
Forget the Kosovo Albanians, the South Ossetians, the Abkhazians, Saakashvili and the Dalai Lama. These are relics of an older world that might deserve their own theme park, but not their own state.”
alas, my last response to Ian on the subject of Kosovo seems to have been lost in the internet miasma. that is always extremely frustrating. I’ll just limit myself to the main point – being that since Milosevic had already offered Kosovo up to NATO control prior to the bombing, we can’t take the official reasons for the NATO operation seriously. it was in fact a textbook case of criminal aggression on NATO’s part. of course there are differences between Kosovo and South Ossetia, but enough similarities for Russia to want to make a point out of it. observa if I knew that article was by the idiot spengler I never would have clicked it – however it did lead me to this much more worthwhile (prescient) article from July – “A War Waiting to Happen” by Engdahl. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JG16Ag01.html
It’s fair to say that the idea of the state as a ‘reduced universal’ has gone past the high water mark and is receding in the face of ‘enlarged particularities’ that are challenging the notion of the state being an effective and impartial representative of its constituents.
It seems to be a mixture of the states in question handling such tensions poorly, and others manipulating and promoting seperatist tensions for their own percieved gain.
“I’ll just limit myself to the main point – being that since Milosevic had already offered Kosovo up to NATO control prior to the bombing, we can’t take the official reasons for the NATO operation seriously.”
Yes we can becasue Milosevic had a decade long history of violating agreeemnts and of agreeing “in principle” while somehow never actually acting on his commitments.
I stll want to know why the oil & gas market customers will pay a premium for non-Russian product. Not on moral grounds, surely?
I note that the quote Observa so approves of doesn;t mention the 3.5 million Israeli Jews or the one million or so Kuwaitis.
Sean, presumably because other suppliers are less likely to stop supply for political reasons.
Russia has on several occassiosn cut off gas and oil supplies to ex-Soviet states.
The western Europeans have to wonder if the Russians will do the same to them in the event of any future diplomatic spat.
Of course, rather than shifting to new gas suppliers the western Europeans will simply accelerate their rush to wind and nuclear.
“Yes we can becasue Milosevic had a decade long history of violating agreeemnts and of agreeing “in principleâ€? while somehow never actually acting on his commitments.”
Which agreements? the Dayton accords? I don’t actually think what you’re saying is valid, otherwise the war would never have ended, since it did indeed end with an agreement from Milosevic (brokered by Russia), and the interesting point is that the final agreement that ended the war was almost exactly the same as the offer that NATO had rejected before the war!! it was almost as if NATO just wanted an excuse to flex its muscles and murder some Serbs, and then, as though satiated after an org@sm, decided that it didn’t actually need what it had previously demanded.
Ian,
It also missed the 300,000 or so Georgians that were ethnically cleansed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the early 1990s. Odd that.
plus, if you think you can take NATO’s argument that it was acting against ethnic cleansing seriously, what of the fact that a much worse campaign of ethnic cleansing was, at the precise same time, taking place inside NATO? to say nothing of all the non-NATO regimes to which NATO countries was selling armaments.
No, the whole thing was a bloody fraud. I don’t blame you for supporting the NATO campaign because I did too at the time – but I changed my mind after I read up on the details and realized that I had been a victim of propaganda.
Most of my knowledge of this war is based on either media reports, or wikipedia, so I could be completely wrong.
It initially seemed rather strange that when Georgia started to invade South Ossetia, that it didn’t try to destroy or otherwise block the Roki Tunnel, which is the sole land route through which Russian forces can enter South Ossetia. Instead, it seemed that Saakashvili gambled on Georgian land forces being able to get there before the Russians attacked.
Reports suggest that at the start of the war, there was a massive artillery and rocket attack on Tskhinvali. There are conflicting reports about the number of casualties from that, it could be anywhere from less than 100 to over 2000. In any case, the attack on Tskhinvali lead to large amounts of people fleeing to North Ossetia through the Roki Tunnel. This is why I think that Georgia did not try to immediately close the tunnel – when people flee the war zone, there is less of a hostile population to deal with.
“It initially seemed rather strange that when Georgia started to invade South Ossetia, that it didn’t try to destroy or otherwise block the Roki Tunnel, which is the sole land route through which Russian forces can enter South Ossetia. Instead, it seemed that Saakashvili gambled on Georgian land forces being able to get there before the Russians attacked.”
I suspect they wanted the tunnel intact because of its commercial importance to Georgia.
“plus, if you think you can take NATO’s argument that it was acting against ethnic cleansing seriously, what of the fact that a much worse campaign of ethnic cleansing was, at the precise same time, taking place inside NATO? to say nothing of all the non-NATO regimes to which NATO countries was selling armaments.”
Stopping ethnic cleansing was a valid legal rationale for the action.
The real reason was probably, as I’ve suggested already, to stop a mass exodus of Kosovars leading to the larger Blakan war everyoen was worreid abotu at the time.
If the ehads of NATO were the murderous psychotic thrill-killers you think, why didn’t they use Bosnia as an excuse to do the same thing years earlier.
Assuming US and western benevolence is a bad guide to interpretting world events, assuming their malevolence is an equally bad guide.
Having said that, I’m going to do some further reading on this topic when I have more time.
stopping ethnic cleansing was not a valid legal rationale – one, because there wasn’t actually ethnic cleansing taking place (at least on anything near the scale of what NATO-Turkey was doing to the Kurds at the same time.
and two, because there was no UN Security Council authorization, so it was illegal.
the mass exodus of Kosovar Albanians occured after the bombing started, not before. NATO actually predicted that its bombing would cause this to happen – and it did! and it stopped when NATO agreed to the Serbian offer that they initially rejected. so that can’t be the reason.
and one more thing, if NATO was so anti-ethnic cleansing, why did they allow the KLA to totally cleanse Kosovo of its Serbian inhabitants once it was in charge of the region?
What has been a bit amusing with the recent Georgia/Ossetia/Russia thing has been the number of instant experts ready to opine loudly about it. Funny, because I would have thought it was a bit of a specialist subject.
#44 Ian Gould Says: August 13th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
And we all know the evidence for the Caucasus’ ethnic nastiness – that oasis of harmonious diversity! – is just as flimsy as the evidence for John Howard’s serial killing.
Which just goes to show that all political “obsessions” are equally worthless, at least if we were to take Ian Gould’s analogical argument seriously.
So Jack how many of those 200,000+ hit are for stuff like a conflict over zoning in the US state of Georgia or “ethnic dances of Georgia”?
“Tomato knitting plumber” turns up 181,000 hits.
Gee maybe any string of three reasonably common words generates around that many hits?
Hi all,
This is what happened. The Russians and Ossetians were harassing me and my citizens, and in any event I’ve been under political pressure. Ok, the Russkis were goading me and I fell for it.
Some so-called “friends” in the US – who have the ear of President Bush and soon-to-be President McCain – assured me that if I took over South Ossetia quickly and cleanly, it would be over before Boris knew what had happened.
(They didn’t explain what would happen after that: how we would keep control.)
They also strongly implied that the Americans would send over some divisions to kick Boris’s ass if necessary.
“You’re our guy, Misha”, they said several times.
OK, I stuffed up, it was stupid, I played into the Russians’ hands, but I was actually in danger of going to prison here in Tbilisi anyway, so I had little to lose.
Sorry about this everyone. Hope I haven’t started WWIII!
Regards,
M.
PS. That Eduard Shevardnadze is keeping very quiet. He’s around here somewhere.
# Ian Gould Says: August 14th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
You seem to be missing something umm, could be the word “conflict” might be pertinent to an “ethnic” war in “Georgia”?
But its easy to see how someone who dismisses the impact population growth has on greenhouse gas emissions could miss such a minor detail.
OTOH, I see your general point, that google hits on specific search strings are not the last word on measuring popular concern. For example, the search string “Ian Gould + pointless + nitpicker” seems to draw a blank on google. Yet it is clearly a real problem for those who are trying to clear some of the debris on the path to knowledge, that half-educated slobs have carelessly strewn in the way.
“OTOH, I see your general point, that google hits on specific search strings are not the last word on measuring popular concern. For example, the search string “Ian Gould + pointless + nitpickerâ€? seems to draw a blank on google. Yet it is clearly a real problem for those who are trying to clear some of the debris on the path to knowledge, that half-educated slobs have carelessly strewn in the way.”
Jack, you’re the one who chose to use the argument from stupefaction to bolster your position.
I’m sorry I embarassed you by pointing out how silly your argument was.
#74 Ian Gould Says: August 14th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
OTOH, it might be because their rational conjunction is of real interest to the public. Rather than it just being a random coincidence that null hypotheses are designed to test.
The former inference would be favoured by Mr Ockham. But we cannot assume his economy of thought when dealing with the Byzantine mental pathways of Mr Gould.
Ian,
Jack may have a point.
The “rational conjunction” of Georgia+Jack+nuts gives 202,000 hits on Google.
Surely it’s no random coincidence?
#77 Ian Gould Says: August 14th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
My “position” was to use googles common sense to show that correlating “ethnic” with “Georgian conflict” was not some private crankish “obsession” of mine. As if the fact that many people take the same view is somehow “stupefying” evidence against it.
I am mildy depressed, but not surprised, that a couple of solipsistic post-modern liberals like Michael and Ian Gould would abuse logic in a vain attempt to challenge this. Its sobering to see how easily the ideological can overpower the logical when this degenerate and disingenuous form of liberalism is let loose in the polity.
“My “positionâ€? was to use googles common sense to show that correlating “ethnicâ€? with “Georgian conflictâ€? was not some private crankish “obsessionâ€? of mine. As if the fact that many people take the same view is somehow “stupefyingâ€? evidence against it.”
Of course, it is wholly irrelevant that if I wished I could use the exact same argument to prove that many peopel obviously support my theory that Jhon Howard is a serial killer.
For the record Jack, ethnic conflict in Georgia is a real and serious problem.
Your attempt to “prove” the bledding obvious by way of google page hits is roughly equivalent to me tryign to “prove” the Earth goes round the sun by reading the entrails of a goat.
Less clear is the logical basis for your belief that this conflict has any direct relevance to Australian public policy in the spheres of immigration, multiculturalism or indigenous affairs.
#79 Michael Says: August 14th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
The world of Michael & Ian Gould appears to be full of “random coincidences”, so much so as to induce a form of intellectual paralysis. It didnt take long for the underlying intellectual pathology of this ideological disease to emerge.
This is a textbook case of what Stove called the “epistemology of the silent scream”. The sufferer is stung by the waspish teachers as an undergraduate. Henceforth unable to make intellectual progress but still apparently alive. Presented by post-modernists who cannot draw a conclusion if it involves connecting two or more dots.
Surely its “no random coincidence” that HOward’s federal intervention designed to arrest the child rape crime wave has apparently made some progress towards this goal. Apparently our resident solipsists think that it was all just good luck.
Pity about any kids who might linger endlessly in purgatory whilst post-modern liberals endlessly turn the problem over – one that they helped to conceive, create and cover-up. But hey, better child abuse continues unchecked rather than they learn their lesson or at least get off their high horse.
Ian Gould Says: August 14th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I did not attempt to prove my “ethnic” point by reference to google. The google reference was presented to prove that my “obsession” with ethnic conflict was not crankish or idiosyncratic, as stupidly suggested by Michael.
I did not use google to demonstrate substantive veracity. THis, as you concede, is practically self-evident. Which was my original substantive point.
I have already made the logical point several times. I am embarrassed on your behalf for your dazzling display of incomprehension skills.
So a vast program of health checks specifically intended to detect evidence of child sexual abuse resutls in a reduction in the number of reprots of sexual abuse and this is proof that the program is working?
You’re a sad, sad little man Strocchi.
“The google reference was presented to prove that my “obsessionâ€? with ethnic conflict was not crankish or idiosyncratic, as stupidly suggested by Michael. – Jack.
And didn’t that work a treat!
Back to the real war……
Given this is likely to yet again demonstrate the shortcomings of the Security Council, is there any chance of its anticipated failure stimulating reform of the SC? Personally, I can’t see how. Remove the veto and most of the veto-weilders are likely to jump ship. It’s a common enough diplomatic paradox – measures designed to ensure agreement/participation (as the veto was) at the negotiation stage then, by their very nature, become obstacles to agreed action.
Based on Jasck’s impeccable logic regarding the NT intervention I have concluded that Labor’s ratification of Kyoto has been a great success since in the subsequent six months, the temperature where I live has fallen substantially.
As noted elsewhere, the plans must have been sitting on the shelf and the troops already mobilised.
July 15th (Associated press)
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Georgian and U.S. troops started a joint military exercise Tuesday amid growing tensions between the ex-Soviet republic and Russia, a Georgian defense ministry official said.
Also Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry started a military exercise in the nearby North Caucasus region. Ministry spokesman Yuri Ivanov said the drill had “nothing to do� with the Georgian-U.S. maneuvers.
#84 Ian Gould Says: August 14th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
You are showing off your dazzling incomprehension skills again. Obviously if the incidence of child STDs ex-post intervention is lower than what it was ex-ante then, yes, this is “proof that the program is working”. Unless you are a solipsist, an assumption that it would be rash not to make when dealing with people like Ian Gould.
The article makes it fairly clear that the intervention reduced the rate of child-rape and therefore the rate of child STDs.
[emphasis added for the morally obtuse]
THere is no other plausible explanation for the recently improved health and safety of these children. Unless perhaps you are suggesting it was one of those random strokes of good fortune that just keep happening after Howard’s cultural shake-ups – you know, war on drugs, border control, clampdown on terrorists,
Howard’s introduction of adult supervision, including more cops on the beat and more docs on the rounds, did the trick. Most of the general populace (60%+) are happy with the outcome, as are aboriginals “on the ground”, especially the women. They have too much at stake to let the po-mo liberals ruin and rort things again.
THis is good news for kids at risk. Bad news for die-hard opponents of the intervention who, having lost control of their failed social experiment, now have only the curses of their subjects to keep them amused.
“You are showing off your dazzling incomprehension skills again. Obviously if the incidence of child STDs ex-post intervention is lower than what it was ex-ante then, yes, this is “proof that the program is workingâ€?. Unless you are a solipsist, an assumption that it would be rash not to make when dealing with people like Ian Gould.”
No Jack it proves that the supposed underground epidemic of undiagnosed sexual abuse which justified spending one billion dollars of public money never existed.
“The figures also showed that total diagnoses of chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and trichomoniasis declined in the second half of last year, compared with the first half, following the intervention.”
For soemone who claism to right abotu science for a living you display a worrying level of ignorance about how it works.
Ever stop to think that there might be other factors at work?
Like for example seaonsal variation in the rate of diagnosies linked to the school year or to the wet season?
What happened in the prior year and the year before that?
Is the decline a new phenomena or the ocntinuation of a trend which precedes the intervention?
what’s the latency between infection and detectable symptoms?
How long do kids remain infected on average?
If there was a sudden abrupt decline in the rate of sexual offences immediately following intervention how long would that take to reduce the overall incidence of infection?
Now why don’t you go look up the word “sollipsist” and try to use it correctly in future?
I will not be wasting my time by respondign to Mr. Strocchi further on this thread.
He will, of course, interpret this as a sign of victory.
But then if Mr Strocchi had been the Captain on the Titanic he would have described the maiden voyage as a brilliant success (owing solely to his own unmatched brilliance) marred only by minor operational difficulties blown out of all proportion by theose damned post-modern liberals (who fill the same role in Strocchi’s cosmology as demons did in that of the medieval Chruch).
Having explained all my points in minute and repeated detail I beleive that any reasonable and impartial reader will have comprehended them.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone take such pride in their statistical incompetence as Jack.
I guess he can blame the journalist who wrote the article, but he’ll have to take responsibility for choosing to take it at face value, when anyone with any familiarity with journalists and stats, would know better.
First, lets just look a the numbers supplied by the Oz – 5 cases in Jan-June, 3 in July-Dec.
Does this signify anything much at all? Hardly. Maybe a closer look at the data might show that in July-Dec, fewer tests were conducted in that age group. Or that this much variability might be nothing unusual in a condition with low incidence rates.
But as Ian very sensibly asks “What happened in the prior year…”?
To even begin to make sense of the numbers, we should at least look at the 2006 figures. And what was the incidence in Jan-June 2006? It was zero.
Gee, how’s Jack going to massage that figure into his preconceived narrative?
“Gee, how’s Jack going to massage that figure into his preconceived narrative?”
He won’t he’ll just repeat his claim more loudly and more shrillly; accuse you of protecting paedophiles and throw in some other choice bits of personal abuse.
Give Jack a break, he’s still mourning the election outcome of last year.
These things take time. He needs some space.
I think the most reasonable theory I’ve heard so far is that shakaashvili conlcuded that whoever succeeded Bush as President of the US would be far less sympathetic to Georgia than Bush (who likes to claim the democratic (?) revolution there as one of his few foreign affairs successes).
At the same time, Russia’s military position was continuing to get stronger as it pumps its oil price windfall into arms spending.
So rather than some calculated act of aggression this was a last desparate attempt to expel Russia from Georgian territory.
I’m just as worried for Poland, if they decide to allow the US to put the missle shield there who knows what Russia will do?
shane@96: The military significance of missile shields old and new is not to protect against an enemy strike, but to politically enable a first strike by mitigating the perceived risks of a devastating response. If I were a Russian military planner, I’d be very worried about Poland hosting any such US weapons system, the aims of which would be immediately apparent. If I were a Pole I’d be worried too.
Meanwhile I see the Ukrainians are flexing their muscles over the Russian naval base on their territory at Sebastopol. Here as in Georgia the boundaries of the former Soviet Socialist Republics became the new international boundaries and here as in Georgia these boundaries favoured the seceding states. You might remember that the Russians and the Great Western Powers fought a war there in the 1840s over the status of the Crimea, which was nominally an independent Tartar monarchy under the ‘protection’ of the Ottomans. The Crimea was never part of historical Ukraine, but now because of Stalin’s loathing of small ethnic minorities and love of administrative convenience, it is Ukrainian. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more of Sebastopol, and that the US will claim the high moral ground on the issue notwithstanding its even more dubious tenure at Guantanamo.
i dont think that is possible ian,
the same guy that advises mcCain on foreign policy, randy scheunamann, was/is an advisor to the georgian governemt on its foreign policy
so i think the georgians would feel pretty safe with mcCain
and Zbigniew Brzezinski is advising obama, and hates the russians and will do whatever he can to continue the encirclement
Back to the main point (sorry for that).
The reaction from the West, particularly from the US and Germany makes it more likely (IMHO) that Saakashvili’s plan (if that it what it was) is working. Merkel’s position on NATO membership for Georgia is becoming clearer – and in Georgia’s favour.
Great plan Mickeil, a touch of genius my boy!
The nong Saakashvili will be impeached within 18 months – you mark my words.