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Yes, Let’s Stop Believing Propaganda

James says that Anne Applebaum has things “so right” in her latest column on Russia and Georgia, but here James and I will have to disagree. Applebaum gets many things right, but one of her most important points is simply wrong. She wrote: Their most important conclusion? Georgia started it and killed civilians in the […]

James says that Anne Applebaum has things “so right” in her latest column on Russia and Georgia, but here James and I will have to disagree. Applebaum gets many things right, but one of her most important points is simply wrong. She wrote:

Their most important conclusion? Georgia started it and killed civilians in the process. My conclusion? We knew that already [bold mine-DL]. We also knew [bold mine-DL], and indeed have known for some time, that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is susceptible to extreme bouts of criminal foolhardiness. A year ago this month, he attacked demonstrators in Tbilisi with riot police, arrested opposition leaders, and even smashed up a Rupert Murdoch-owned television station—possibly not, I wrote at the time, the best way to attract positive international media coverage. I’m told Saakashvili—who did indeed overthrow the corrupt Soviet nomenklatura that ran his country—has many virtues. But caution, cool-headedness, and respect for civilian lives and democratic norms are not among them.

We knew that about him [bold mine-DL]—and so did the Russians.

These easy references to what “we” all knew all along are troubling, because for most of the last three months almost our entire political class and more than a few pundits spoke and acted as if they knew nothing of the kind. Russian aggression, Russian imperialism, Russian expansionism–these are the phrases that have defined the debate among establishment figures. Not that long ago, Glenn Greenwald was upbraided for pointing out this obvious truth.

In the very early days of the conflict, Georgian culpability for escalating the conflict was widely acknowledged, at least among the bloggers who were paying attention, but for the most part this was because Saakashvili apologists and Russophobes had not yet swung into action until the start of the week following the initial escalation. Likewise, Saakashvili the reckless hotheaded authoritarian was nowhere to be found in most of the Western commentary on the war; he was the leader of the “democratically-elected government of Georgia,” waging heroic resistance against the evil empire. Seeing the main claims of the Georgian government disproved convicingly and the findings of independent investigations in major Western newspapers after months of loose talk about Russian aggression, neo-Soviet empires and our supposedly vital concern for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline should not be so easily dismissed as redundant and obvious, when it has been anything but obvious to many of our political leaders and opinionmakers that Georgia struck first and bears a large share of the blame for what transpired. When Applebaum talks about what “we” knew, by and large she means that this is what informed people not necessarily inclined to engage in pro-Georgian boosterism knew and said at the time.

That brings up the question–what did Applebaum know at the time? What did she have to say when the war was happening? For someone who knew and understood all of these things, she sounded shocked and bewildered by what the Russians were doing, even though this is now supposed to be something we all knew. Back on 8 August she wrote:

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes a response more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have now become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular “frozen” conflict has escalated right now.

The clear implication here is that the answer for why the escalation happened was to be found in Moscow, not in Tbilisi.

I found her response disappointing at the time, even if it wasn’t that surprising, but in its way the new column is more disappointing. There is a strange false equivalence that Applebaum sets up here. On one side, there is Georgian propaganda, which our government and a large number of Western commentators have publicly swallowed more or less whole, and on the other side there is Russian propaganda that essentially no one outside of Russia believes, but we are enjoined not to believe in either one. That would make sense if anyone did believe the official Moscow line, but no one does. Even the Ossetian woman from Tskhinvali writing in the L.A. Times, whom Applebaum cites as an example of the “cartoonish” hostile view of the Georgian government, does not endorse the position Applebaum claims that she does. Ms. Tskhovrebova does not claim that Georgia is “a tin-pot dictatorship, an evil American-neocon lackey, and the personal fiefdom of a major war criminal,” and it is a lousy thing for Applebaum to do to portray her perfectly reasonable criticism of Saakashvili and U.S. support for his government as mere vilification.

Tskhovrebova actually said that the actions taken against Tskhinvali were “ruthless” (a reasonably fair characterization), that the Georgian government has been accused “by some” of war crimes (this is true–the independent organizations that have investigated the war have recognized that some of the tactics used against Tskhinvali rose to the level of war crimes), and calls Saakashvili a “so-called democratic leader.” It is undeniable that were Saakashvili not a client of the United States and Europe, his credentials as a democrat in good standing would have been revoked by Washington and Brussels long ago, but when an Ossetian who was on the receiving end of his attack on her city casts doubt on those credentials this is tantamount to reducing him to nothing more than a “tin-pot dictator.” Personally, I see no conflict between recognizing that he is an elected leader and also an authoritarian with bellicose and sometimes thuggish tendencies, but Tskhovrebova, who is a leading member of the Ossetian peace movement, does not even go so far as to say this. She very carefully avoids falling into the trap of repeating anything that sounds like Moscow propaganda, which makes her indictment of Saakashvili all the more powerful, and yet Applebaum outrageously tags her as a propagandist. This is the same sort of tactic that is frequently used to portray even the moderates who belong to a marginalized group in any conflict zone as being guilty of the worst rhetorical and ideological excesses of the most extreme members of the community. The only people who should be interested in discrediting Ossetian peace activists are hard-liners in Moscow and Tbilisi. Applebaum should know better.

Meanwhile, those falling in more or less with the pro-Georgian party line include the current and future Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States as well as more than a few likely Cabinet officials in the incoming administration. This ongoing Western and particularly U.S. support for Georgia, which is what Tskhovrebova is criticizing, has not changed at all, and from the remarks of Secretary Gates in Estonia earlier this month we know that the insanity of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia remains the official policy of our government. Applebaum makes clear near the end that her sympathies lie with the Western status quo that this year’s events have utterly discredited:

Until then, Western leaders should support Georgian democracy—not particular Georgian democrats—and prepare a unified response to the Russian military escapades to come.

So, no, James, I don’t think Applebaum was “so right” in all of this.

Update: Leave it to Nick Kristof of all people to start making sense on this question:

Note to Mr. Obama: It would be a nightmare to have our troops tethered through NATO to Misha. In any case, Georgia doesn’t obviously qualify for NATO membership since it doesn’t control its full territory, while the talk about NATO pushes all the wrong Russian nationalist buttons.

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