This morning I arrived in Chicago after my brief vacation back home.  There is a lot that has happened in the last few days that I will be talking about before too much longer, but for now I’ll say a few things quickly.  I should say that my initial reaction to the choice of Sarah Palin was much more like Michael‘s than anyone else’s I have seen.  While I have very few reasons to complain about Gov. Palin’s views (her foreign policy remarks on Friday being chief among them), I think it does her a tremendous disservice to name her to a national ticket before she is fully prepared for that role, just as it would have been a disservice to Jindal had he been named.  Leave aside for the moment the important point that drafting a governor not yet halfway through her first term neglects and devalues the importance of state government and insults Palin’s voters. 

If the goal is to drag down the ticket and at the same time provide a Buchananite scapegoat for Republican defeat in the fall, a defeat I now believe to be more likely than it was a few weeks ago, McCain seems to have done his work well.  As Gov. Palin’s remarks yesterday made clear, she seems unlikely to balance the worst instincts of McCain and his advisors and may instead be used to confer conservative legitimacy on McCain’s domestic and foreign agendas.  The remarkable thing about the choice is that it was done for transparently electoral reasons and appears at first glance to be a poor choice with respect to governance, but in reality Palin will likely prove to be an electoral liability, possibly costing McCain the election in the Midwest, and yet I think she would probably be a competent and effective Vice President despite her short time in statewide office.    

P.S.  The controversy over the firings of her state trooper ex-brother-in-law and the Public Safety Commissioner, which had already prompted the establishment of an investigation by the Alaska legislature last month, is also going to dog the campaign, whether or not Gov. Palin did anything wrong.  Correction: I misstated the nature of the controversy: Wooten, the ex-brother-in-law, was not fired, but Monegan, the Public Safety Commissioner, was fired.  It was the questionable nature of Monegan’s firing, which may or may not have been done in retribution for his refusal to fire Wooten, that drew complaints and prompted the legislature to authorize an investigation.

Update: Of course, it will be more difficult for the party regulars to blame the loss on a Buchananite if she insists that she never supported Buchanan.  Apparently, she did not support him in the 2000 election.

There are any number of theories offered for the tightness. One is that Obama is too temperamentally aloof for most Americans. ~Andrew Sullivan

The word choice here caught my attention.  Over the last few months, I have noticed “aloof” being used more and more often to describe Obama.  This jumps out at me because I remember using it back in February to describe him, or more precisely to predict how he would be perceived in the general election and why this would end up being his downfall:

The reason why the relatively more wonkish, detail-oriented candidates repeatedly come up short is that they confuse a display of competence and understanding with demonstrating intense expertise with the specifics of their policies, which matter primarily to interest groups, bloggers and box-checking ideological gnomes.  Romney could run rings around McCain and Huckabee with his expertise, but that didn’t matter.  The same has been true with Clinton in her struggle with Obama. 

All the things that horrify a republican about mass democracy–the identitarianism, the ”gut-level connection,” the vacuous rhetoric and the cheap, manipulative symbolism–help to explain why we end up with the candidates we do, and they will explain why the aloof, relatively more expert candidate in the general election, Obama, will end up losing.  

Tagging Obama as aloof was not entirely new in February, but my commenters at the time thought I was off the mark.  Politico apparently made the same claim in a December ’07 article.  However, I think the aloofness goes hand in hand with the wonkishness and expertise, so that while it is electorally a problem it is a signal of other desirable qualities.  It’s just not often the case that someone with this combination prevails in a popular election.  Most of McCain’s critics probably think that it deals him a serious blow to describe McCain as a visceral, emotionally-driven person, but I think those of us who are against McCain (regardless of whether we are for Obama) make a mistake if we treat this as an electoral weakness, just as we are missing something when we emphasize how little McCain knows about any policy questions.  They are the sources of his strength as a candidate, and I suspect that they are part of the explanation for why he continues to run far ahead of the generic GOP candidate.     

P.S. Extra points for identifying the origin of the title.  It’s not hard, but I thought I would try something a bit less serious before I go on vacation.

Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq? ~Djimali Avago (quoted in article)

Along with the Ossetian refugees who have fled into North Ossetia, the Georgian people are already suffering the consequences of their government’s criminal irresponsibility, and they are understandably bitter towards the West on account of the belief that the West would reward Georgia for charting a “pro-Western” course.  Earlier today I was remarking to someone that I would still like to go to Georgia, but after this week I supposed that Georgians might not care for American visitors.  Perhaps attitudes towards Americans as such will not change that much, but it seems impossible that pro-U.S. government sentiment is going to be very strong in the future.  Probably rather like Turkish public opinion, which had once been very keen on EU membership and soured after German and French opposition postponed entry indefinitely, Georgian public opinion may well turn against the political path that Saakashvili has represented.  It would not be the first time that disaster in the field has caused a dramatic shift in domestic politics, and it is probably more likely to happen since Saakashvili wagered his presidency on the success of this attack. 

I second Greg Djerejian’s remarks from the update to his post on the war:

It’s precisely because I care about innocent Georgian lives being needlessly spilled that I’m so dismayed by Saakashvili’s recklessness, including notably his naive belief in Western support should Putin get nasty (by the by, and to stress again, the notion that Georgia would become a full-fledged member of NATO was always absurd fare, and shame on Brussels and Washington for playing pretend).  

This might be an appropriate time to reflect on the exploitation of U.S. allies during 2002-03 and during the war in Iraq.  New and aspiring NATO members were particularly susceptible to the combination of arm-twisting and enticements that Washington used to get the heads of government from so-called “New Europe” to declare their support for an invasion of Iraq, but perhaps most tragic and inexcusable of all of these cases is Georgia.  While a boon to contractors, Georgia’s significant increases in military spending diverted resources in a poor country to building up the armed forces, an investment as misguided as it is now wasted.  To make itself an attractive candidate, the Georgian government had to demonstrate its eagerness to be out of Russia’s shadow, which inevitably involved confrontational posturing and actions that riled Moscow into increasingly punitive and often excessive responses.  In the twisted establishment view, to be pro-Western in the former Soviet states is first and foremost to be impeccably anti-Russian, which would be ridiculed as counterproductive nationalist bluster anywhere else but serves as a useful barometer of how willing a population is to be used as a pawn against the Russians.  The gradual realization by those who live in the country being used as a pawn that their country is being used this way naturally inspires resentment. 

Having been excited by the prospect of membership, which Western governments led Georgia to believe was only a matter of time, many Georgians unfortunately took Western assurances at face value.  And, after all, why not?  Yes, Georgia is just about as far from the Atlantic as you can get and still have any claim to being part of Europe and America has no vital interests at stake here, but there were so many other candidates admitted in previous rounds that made no more sense than admitting Georgia.  For goodness’ sake, even the Albanians have now been allowed to join, and no one would confuse their country with one that is either strategically important or militarily ready to merit inclusion.  You might say that if Albania is good enough for NATO, Georgia would be, too, except that neither belongs in the Alliance.  

That doesn’t change the expectation of being able to get in without much trouble.  Every time NATO expansion had happened in the past, the Russians issued grave warnings and denounced the U.S. but ultimately were not in a position to stop it from happening.  Relations between Moscow and the West kept getting worse, but the Georgian government must have taken Russian inaction over the entry of the Baltic states as the final proof they needed that Russia would do nothing.  From there it was a few short steps to launching the raid on the same assumption: Russia will protest and retaliate in certain ways as it had done in the past (e.g., economic sanctions, harrassing ethnic Georgians in Russia) but will ultimately yield. 

Clearly, Saakashvili guessed wrong and has endangered his country’s future in the process, but it is not entirely unfair for Saakashvili and his countrymen to protest at what they understandably feel to be abandonment.  Imagine how much more cruel the disappointment would have been had Georgia been put on the course to membership and the same hard political realities kept NATO from lending support.  Our government should never make promises that it cannot or will not keep, and while strategic ambiguity is useful in public it is vital that clients and would-be clients understand exactly how much support the U.S. government is willing to provide.  Saakashvili’s blustery rhetoric about how the war is a defense of American “values” and how the future of the world is at stake sounds ridiculous because it is, but he is simply acting as if what President Bush said in his Second Inaugural were the working policy of the United States of America.  While it does not excuse him, Saakashvili has above all made the mistake of believing President Bush when he said that American liberty depends on the liberty of the rest of the world.  Since he fancies himself the champion of Georgian liberty, regardless of how hard that it is to take, he may have thought that the “freedom agenda” would save him.  Instead, he has pretty much ensured that the “freedom agenda” will lose whatever credibility it had.       

Update: The NYT has a similar article on disappointed Georgians.

Without wanting to dwell too much on Roger Kimball’s response to the war in Georgia, his new post concerning the candidates’ reactions prompted two reactions.  When I saw the headline, “The crisis in Georgia, 9/11, and the lessons of gratitude,” a strange thought flashed through my mind: “Maybe he’ll thank Putin for the help he provided us after 9/11!”  The more elaborate version of that momentary thought would go something like this: “Kimball’s a fair-minded guy.  He’s going to remind everyone that the first government to lend unequivocal support to the U.S. after 9/11 was the Russian government, and that Russia’s assistance and cooperation helped make the initial, overwhelmingly successful stages of the war in Afghanistan possible.  Maybe he’ll even work in a reference to Solzhenitsyn’s last published interview in which the great man talked about a missed opportunity in forging better U.S.-Russian relations.  I bet Kimball is going to temper all of his overheated rhetoric about Moscow reassembling the Soviet empire and remember that Russia was one of our strongest allies in the wake of the attacks.” 

From there he might have gone on to argue that the truly tragic thing about this unnecessary war is that both nations could be valuable U.S. allies, and that through a series of mistakes our ties to Georgia became one of the causes of the deterioration in previously decent U.S.-Russian relations.  Kimball could then have said that it makes no sense to perpetuate Cold War attitudes towards Russia in a post-9/11 world when a strong Washington-Moscow relationship is more vital than ever.  No such luck.  The post wasn’t about that at all.

Instead, Kimball offered these observations towards the end of the post:

On 9/11 we were grateful to have a leader who could distinguish between friends and enemies and who was not so crippled by moral relativism that he believed that victims should be equated with their victimizers. In 2008, we have a choice between 1) a man who knows evil and repudiates it and 2) a man who believes that there is “fault on both sides” and that discredited “progressive” institutions like the United Nations are better equipped to deal with disputes among sovereign nations than the nations themselves.

Which would you choose?

If I have only those choices and #2 is supposed to be Obama, then I would choose Obama.  No question about it.  It’s not even close.  You have to wonder how Kimball thinks wars between sovereign nations will be resolved if international institutions are rejected entirely and one of the belligerents is much weaker than the other.  It won’t work out well for the small country.  That much is certain.  In any case, after the last nearly seven years since 9/11, we have seen how the instinct that served Bush reasonably well in responding to terrorist attacks have been one of his most ruinous flaws in handling foreign policy questions, because he has consistently looked at conflicts and threats simply in terms of whether or not such-and-such a regime is to one degree or another evil.  I agree that McCain is very much like Bush in his aversion to complexity and hostility to the idea that both sides in a conflict usually do bear some share of the blame.  In this view, one side serves the forces of darkness and the other is simply resisting evil.  This view also contributes to the dehumanization and denigration of everyone on the side that is deemed reprobate, and it excuses injustices committed against that side because they are supposed to embody evil.   

But let’s think a little more about how Kimball is framing this.  By likening McCain’s Georgia response to Bush’s response to 9/11, Kimball is implying that Russian retaliation in response to an escalation of violence is morally equivalent to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 (i.e., both are evil).  That would mean that Kimball thinks that the military of an internationally recognized government engaged in a retaliatory operation in defense of a proxy is doing something very similar to what Atta and the other hijackers did.  This sort of equivalence will accomplish only one thing, which is unintentionally to legitimize the terrorists and blur the lines between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force.  Indeed, this is the logic employed by the very relativists Kimball attacks, since they also tend to blur these lines.

Even though Saakashvili escalated the violence and bears a large share of responsibility for the deaths that have followed, McCain evidently did notsee that evil and did not repudiate it, which gets at the heart of how surprisingly flexible this gnostic approach to foreign affairs can be.  There is certainly no foolish consistency for the morally clear.  This moral clarity, so called, is the ability to see the crimes and villainy of people whom you already regard as villains, while being largely blind to one’s own flaws and those of one’s allies.  It also seems to involve a healthy dose of ingratitude towards those governments that have lent support and aid to ours in times of crisis, provided that those with “moral clarity” have decided that a given government is malevolent.

McCain, though, went with his instinct and with a sense of moral clarity that seems to have been borne out by Russia’s widening campaign. ~Ben Smith

So now McCain is trying to claim that he foresaw what Russia is currently doing in Georgia, when the only reason McCain “knew” what Russia would do is that he always assumes that Russians have the very worst motives and goals and then declares himself prescient when Russia does something objectionable.  At least Smith’s use of the word instinct is correct–McCain is viscerally opposed to Russia, and so instinctively lurches to whatever the anti-Russian position is on any given issue.  The video Smith digs up includes (the videos are being circulated by McCain aides) shows how fanatically anti-Russian McCain has been for at least the last decade and includes one of the many Shevardnadze references that McCain made during the 1999-2000 campaign.  Before he was the corrupt, dictatorial ruler who had to go (to make way for the reckless despotic one), Shevardnadze was, in McCain’s estimation, “one of the great men in the history of the world.”  Seriously. 

In the clip McCain imagines that the Second Chechen War was part of an agenda of reconquest aimed at former Soviet states, despite the rather important detail that Chechnya was within Russia’s borders all along and the war involved the suppression of a separatist movement that employed terrorist tactics.  By all means, let’s track down every pro-Chechen and pro-Shevardnadze thing McCain has ever said and look over his record on Russia very carefully.  Let’s remember how supportive of the Chechens he and those around him were, and how many excuses they used to make for anti-Russian terrorism.  That will, or should, scare enough people that it might finally start to undermine the media’s acceptance that he has foreign policy expertise, and it should draw a good, useful contrast between the two candidates by showing one of them to be possessed of a strange hatred for Russia that ensures that all of his policy proposals concerning Russia are hostile and dangerous.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s President, might have been profoundly unwise to employ massive force against the pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia last Thursday, but his poor judgement is not the point. The commanders of Russian forces and their political masters in the Kremlin hoped he would behave exactly as he did. ~James Sherr

So when one side in a conflict does something that is profoundly unwise that leads to a dramatic escalation of violence that has already killed thousands of people, it’s beside the point?  That the Russians hoped Saakashvili would do something monumentally stupid, reckless and dangerous does not relieve him of the responsibility for doing it.  When you consider that war with Russia was almost certain to result from his decision and that the outcome of any conflict with Russia was always going to be very bad for his country, Saakashvili’s profound lack of wisdom seems to me to be at the heart of the issue.  You can argue that this is not what matters most at the moment, since the blunder has been committed and cannot be undone, but if we are going to judge Saakashvili’s actions I don’t see how his disastrous blunder can be dismissed so easily.  Embarking on a course that likely meant war with a vastly superior force in a fight he had no hope of winning was a deeply unjust thing to do.  Having been entrusted with high office to protect the interests of his country and people, he betrayed that trust with a horrible decision. 

Do the Russians bear some responsibility for setting the trap that Saakashvili so stupidly walked into?  I suppose they do.  Of course, they are responsible for any excesses they have committed or will commit, and given their overwhelming superiority their campaign ought to judged according to strict standards.  The attacks on Georgian infrastructure and the use of indiscriminate shelling and bombing are wrong and unnecessary.  While I am tempted to ridicule people in our government who have now discovered the importance of proportionality in warfare, since they have never before shown much concern for this principle before now, it is an essential principle that allows us to distinguish between legitimate and excessive uses of force.  Clearly, the war against Lebanon was a disproportionate response, and Russia is in danger of engaging in the same overkill that made the original, limited Israeli retaliation in 2006 go from enjoying broad international support to being almost universally condemned.  Will the Russians advance past Gori and attack the capital?  If they do, they will quickly find themselves with few defenders around the world.

Update: The Russians have reportedly bombed the Tbilisi airport.  I am still not persuaded that Russia intends to annex Georgia, but Moscow does seem to have decided on inflicting total defeat on the Georgians and presumably ousting Saakashvili in the process.  This would be an excessive response.  Just as it was no defense of Georgia’s actions to say that the Russians were goading Saakashvili into lashing out, it will be no defense of Russia’s excesses to say that Georgia escalated the conflict.  Moscow should accept the cease-fire proposal and halt its offensive, or its war in Georgia will start to push indifferent and even sympathetic nations into opposition.  Unfortunately, Moscow is probably more interested in its own kind of “demonstration effect” by making an example of Georgia. 

Update: Somewhat related, I agree entirely with Thomas de Waal, who argues that this was an entirely avoidable conflict and says it is outrageous that Russia is now bombing Georgian towns and villages.  That is why Russia should halt its offensive now and respond to the Georgian offer to negotiate.  His column on this is as balanced as any I’ve seen since the war started.

What we’ll think of is the country of Georgia and we’ll realize that August 8 was the date when Russia began reassembling the former Soviet empire in earnest. ~Roger Kimball

Via Tom Piatak

Yes, just as Iran is poised to revive the Achaemenid Empire!  It’s not just that I find the charges of Russian imperialism a bit tired coming from people who have insisted for years that invading other countries, toppling their governments and setting up puppet states is not imperialism, but I find them very boring.  I mean, how unimaginative can one be to say, “They’re bringing back the Soviet Union!”?  That’s the sort of thing an eccentric Bond villain would try to do.  There are no more workers’ councils, and there is no more USSR.  In every sense of the word, the Soviets are gone and their empire is dust.  No one–not Putin, not Medvedev, not anyone–is bringing it back as it once existed.  Now if Kimball had said that Moscow is trying to reassemble parts of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, at least in terms of its territorial dimensions, I would still say that he is grossly exaggerating what’s going on, but at least he wouldn’t be embarrassing himself by saying completely nonsensical things. 

The fact is that Russia has yet to advance its ground forces beyond the separatist regions, and it has given no indication in its movements or its rhetoric that it intends to do anything in the way of “reabsorbing” or annexing Georgia.  This is irresponsible alarmism.  While some suspect that the endgame is to overthrow Saakashvili, we cannot know that, either.  As hard as it is for some people to believe, Russia still seems to be defending the status quo ante and exacting punishment on Saakashvili’s government for his blunder.  When that starts to change, I will be among the first to acknowledge it, because at that point Russia’s fairly limited response will have mutated into something else.  There are parallels with the war in Lebanon two years ago: Israel could have waged a limited, focused campaign against Hizbullah that would have had the backing of most other countries, or it could engage in the wholesale wrecking of an entire country and lose international sympathy, and it chose the latter.  To the extent that the Russians are already starting to imitate Israel’s response in targeting public infrastructure, I think they are making a mistake.  The indiscriminate nature of the fighting so far is very troubling, seeing as it has already killed 1,500 people. 

Note well that the same people who are warning desperately that Russia is trying to get its hands on the BTC pipeline are the same people who will deny to their dying breath that oil had anything to do with the invasion of Iraq.  It might be that they have a point about Iraq, but just watch how they attribute the most mercenary ambitions to other powers that they absolutely refuse to contemplate when thinking about our policies.  Note also how keeping the BTC pipeline from falling under Russian control or influence has become the most frequently-cited reason among Westerners why we should help the Georgians (i.e., they are urging us to back Georgia in a war for oil, or at least access to oil). 

Update: I said I would acknowledge that something has changed when Russian forces advanced beyond the separatist areas, and here is that post.

Charles Ganske has an interesting post about the war and the overheated anti-Russian reactions in the English-language  media, echoing my complaints about predictable Western commentary on Russia:

CNN briefly portrayed Russia as the big red USSR while showing Americans where South Ossetia and Georgia are on the world map. Hugh Hewitt, one of the most popular conservative talk radio show hosts in America, cited a report on the air from Austin-based Strategic Forecasting Inc. asserting that Russia was using the Georgia campaign to intimidate all of the former Soviet republics. The report, Hewitt seemed to imply, suggested a master plan by the Kremlin to revive the at least a rump Soviet Union through military might. Hugh Hewitt’s guest, Larry Kudlow, a popular conservative commentator who hosts the highly watched “Kudlow and Company” TV show on CNBC, called Russian leaders “war criminals”. A news announcer on the same national talk radio network said that Russian forces had reportedly killed 1,400 people in the region, even though this was actually the number claimed by the South Ossetians as victims of Georgian shelling and bombs. Headlines on AOL news said, “Russia Invades Small Neighbor”, which makes for a more dog bites man headline than, “Russia puts troops into small region invaded by former Soviet republic asserting sovereignty over disputed territory”. The U.S. taxpayer funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website published a ridiculous article by Echo Moskvy radio’s Yulia Latynina, calling South Ossetia a “terrorist state” and comparing the region to the PLO or Hezbollah statelets in southern Lebanon — as if the South Ossetians were sending suicide bombers and rockets into Georgia.

Ganske then asks an important question:

…why do so many Americans, conservatives especially, who normally proclaim their distrust the media, accept it so unquestioningly on the subject of Russia? After all, it isn’t as if the same biases that lead many Americans to confess to pollsters that they have Obama fatigue from so many puff profiles of the Democratic presidential candidate do not also affect coverage of foreign affairs in the U.S. In other words, a media tendency to focus on compelling personalities, like Vladimir Putin, rather than report on a complex country like Russia from the bottom up. 

Ganske asks several questions that drive home just how persistent the anti-Russian bias in our media coverage is by the simple fact that virtually no one in the West ever asks them:

The question never seems to be raised: what if Russia’s neighbors are occasionally in the wrong? Were Ukraine and Belarus entitled to subsidized Russian gas at a quarter of the European price indefinitely? Is Georgia justified in forcing the issue of a separatist region with arms rather than negotiations? Should Poland host an American radar, supposedly designed to counter the Iranian missile threat, that can track anything in Russian airspace all the way to the Urals? Is Russia always doomed to be a nasty Bear roaming the woods looking for trouble?

The question about subsidized gas supplies is particularly important, since you will frequently hear about how Russia wields its energy supplies as an instrument of policy.  First of all, this is not all that incredible or even all that sinister, since the energy companies are state-run industries that are going to be used to give the government leverage overseas.  But even then the coverage of the change in subsidy levels was misleading, since it emphasized that the price was going up and neglected to note that Ukraine was still receiving the supplies at a heavily discounted rate.  Even so, what would normally have been greeted as a welcome reduction in government distortion of the market price was seen as a dastardly ploy to punish neighboring states.  

Ganske also addresses the important, if obvious point about double standards.  Missing from the discussion of double standards, however, is the extent to which Russian problems with Chechen terrorism have been treated very differently from the way our government has responded to domestic terrorist threats in other countries. 

Update: Greg Djerejian has a good post that covers a lot of ground.  Alex Massie also has a useful round-up of links along with his own comments from yesterday.

One United Nations diplomat joked on Saturday that “if someone went to the Russians and said, ‘OK, Kosovo for Iran,’ we’d have a deal.”

That might be hyperbole, but there is a growing feeling among some officials in the Bush administration that perhaps the United States cannot have it all, and may have to choose its priorities, particularly when it comes to Russia. ~Helene Cooper

It’s an encouraging sign that this feeling is growing at least among some officials, but what does it say about this administration that they apparently believed that the U.S. could have it all and didn’t need to prioritize which policies were more important and which were secondary?  This is the crew that thought it could expand NATO twice in five years and recognize Kosovo, all the while berating Russia for its internal political conditions, and then ask the Russians for help with Iran as if nothing had happened. 

There is a basic problem with having all these satellites whose interests we are supposed to protect.  U.S. interests will often require our government to raise the hopes of small nations, only to dash them when our real priorities conflict with lending support to them.  At the same time, to the extent that our government takes these obligations to numerous satellites seriously it requires compromising or limiting our ability to pursue policies in the American interest.