Your Humble Blogger isn’t some sort of Caucasus maven, but it does seem to me that the NPR people are doing a bad job of explaining this war between Georgia and Russia. Anyway, since the Georgians opened up a can of epic fail on the residents of their own nation, and the Russians (who seem to have had much more advance notice than the Americans) beat the crap out of them and sent them crying home to mother, there seem to me to be only a few really distinct outcomes.
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I think that’s it. There’s no plausible path back to the bad situation that they had before Georgia invaded itself, because there is no way that Georgian forces are going back into South Ossetia or Abkhazia, and there isn’t any plausible way that anybody else is going to commit enough forces to keep Russia out of those areas. It’s just possible that NATO (f’r’ex) will commit defensive forces to keep Russia out of Tblisi, but a push forward? Not so much. Oh, I should probably add the last plausible outcome, although I don’t really like to think about it:
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Two points come to mind immediately, or at least to YHB’s mind. First is that this was a notable and remarkable failure for Georgia. Yes, Russia is bad and should not have been, you know, arming the separatists all along, and shouldn’t have sent forces into the heart of Georgia, and shouldn’t have provided cover for Ossetians killing civilians and running amok. Yeah, yeah. Russia bad. But whether Georgia is sympathetic or not, the fact remains that they sent in troops to lay siege to a city within their own borders, were immediately repelled, left their armor on the field and are now in substantial danger of losing their independence. They have had to sign an agreement that gives the Russian not only unlimited power within South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but also the right to bring their tanks out of those regions and patrol the previously uncontested parts of their country. That’s just embarrassing<\/i>.
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Now, the U.S. has had a strong relationship with Georgia. Our Only President has spoken up for Georgia many times, has visited Georgia and met with President Saakashvili several times. Sen. McCain has a personal relationship with the President of Georgia, a close working relationship with Georgia’s lobbyist state, and he has visited Georgia many, many times. What the hell were they doing?<\/i> I don’t mean that I blame Our Only President for Georgia’s failure. President Saakashvili is a big boy, and Georgia is (or was) an independent nation, and they get to claim responsibility for their own catastrophic failures. But if Sen. McCain is some sort of foreign policy genius, and he has a long and close relationship with the most outstanding pants-crapper of the last five years, well, how does that work exactly?
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The other thing that came to mind is that for me, and I suspect for almost all of us who grew up in these United States, we forget that there are lots of places in the world that are not functionally parts of nations. They are within the internationally recognized borders, but the notional national government doesn’t send in the tax collectors, or if they do send them in, the tax collectors don’t come back. Perhaps because of our federal system, and perhaps because we really do have a strong government that isn’t on the verge of collapse, even a few houses anywhere in this country holding out against the revenooers constitutes a major news story, and is recognizable by name (Ruby Ridge, Waco) for a long time after.
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Before the invasions last week, Georgia’s internationally recognized borders were largely fictional. The two regions called breakaway republics<\/I> were largely outside the control of the supposedly sovereign government. That happens a lot. There are parts of Pakistan where the government doesn’t govern. Parts of India. Parts of many African countries, and a few South American ones and some Asian ones, too. For a decade or so, there was a province of Mexico that was governed by a guy in a ski mask. The Russians didn’t so much collect taxes in Chechnya for a while. And so on. China doesn’t send tax collectors into Taiwan, but the internationally recognized borders include it.
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The thing is, we tend to think that the map is the territory. And the map doesn’t have blank spaces. It’s either in this<\/i> country or it’s in that one<\/i>. It’s either in Georgia or Russia, right? Depending on which side of that line it’s on. But the map isn’t the territory. It’s just the map.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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