BWAH-HA-HA-HA!

Oh, my. I just read something so funny I'm having trouble catching my breath.

Ladies and gentlemen, the comedy stylings of Ms. Condoleezza Rice:

"Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power," Rice told reporters en route to an emergency meeting of NATO foreign ministers set for Tuesday. "That's not the way to deal in the 21st century."

Not -- The way to deal-- In the 21st century!!!

Don't forget to tip your servers, ladies and gentlemen, she'll be here until January.

(For more on the exquisite humor behind this remark, see Glennzilla.)

More Georgia

If you've been wondering how we got to this point, this post by the blogger known as Billmon is well worth reading. An excerpt:

Once again, the US enlargement lobby sprang into action. In February of last year, with the newly born Democratic Congress still waiving its little arms and spitting up mucus, Dick Lugar (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Joe Biden (the committee’s nominally Democratic chairman) introduced the "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act". Like its predecessors, the bill authorized the President to immediately begin treating the Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name – with weapons sales, military advisors, etc. Senate cosponsors included Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and, naturally, John McCain (R-POW).

Also like its predecessors, the bill was whisked through both houses of Congress with about as much deliberation as a resolution praising the Future Farmers of Benton County for their fine showing at the Iowa State Fair – with no hearings, no debate, no roll call votes. President Bush signed it into law on April 9, 2007. The White House put out an official statement marking the occasion. It was one sentence long.

And so, with an absolute minimum of democratic process, the United States of America committed its full prestige and power (if not, just yet, a legally binding guarantee) to the defense of the two former Soviet republics, even though the Russians have repeatedly stated that they regard NATO membership by either country as a direct threat to their own vital security interests. As others have already noted, this is as if China had unilaterally announced a military alliance with Mexico and Cuba. Actually it’s worse: Imagine the US reaction if China announced a military alliance with Mexico, after which the president of Mexico started dropping public hints about taking New Mexico back – by whatever means necessary. (And if that comparison seems unnecessarily paranoid, consider the history of Russia in the 20th century. Even paranoids have real enemies.)

A careful search of Nexus and Google reveals that the number of stories appearing in the pages of major US newspapers and magazines, or on the wires of major American news services, taking note of this fateful decision, equals exactly one: a brief item out of UPI’s Moscow bureau, warning of the Russian reaction. The Georgian and Ukranian press, on the other hand, gave the new law saturation coverage – encouraged by their respective governments, both of which issued official statements describing their future NATO admissions as, in effect, done deals.

The Russians also reacted. Just a few days after the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act was introduced in the Senate, President Putin gave a speech in Munich that was widely reported as his harshest attack to date on America for its allegedly aggressive and hegemonic designs. The New York Times and US government officials (which is a somewhat redundant expression) both professed shock over Putin’s language – without once mentioning the congressional provocation that triggered it.

Georgia

Others have commented that wars are the way Americans learn geography. The hyperbole that has sprung up in the last week about a region no one seems to know anything about is truly impressive in that regard. Before the Russian troops started rolling in, any real awareness of Georgia in the general American mind was probably connected with old people eating yogurt, not a vital United States security interest. Perhaps it is this very lack of knowledge that leads so many to think Georgia must be the Sudatenland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia.

One remarkable aspect of this American habit for "instant geography" is the way a region's history begins only when we start paying attention. The current crisis (and history in Georgia) apparently started either when the Georgians asserted their control of "the break-away region of Ossetia", or the Russians responded to that, or maybe, when the Bush administration did (or did not) send the Georgian government confusing signals about how much we'd back them.

Which is why it's refreshing to read an article like this one by Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post.

Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia have little in common with either Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. They are better understood against the backdrop of the complicated ethnic politics of the Caucasus, a part of the world where historical grudges run deep and oppressed can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.

Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in the shadow of the mountains that rise along Russia's southern border. I was there in March 1991, shortly after the city was occupied by Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia's first acts as Georgian president was to cancel the political autonomy that the Stalinist constitution had granted the republic's 90,000-strong Ossetian minority.

After negotiating safe passage with Soviet interior ministry troops who had stationed themselves between the Georgians and the Ossetians, I discovered that the town had been ransacked by Gamsakhurdia's militia. The Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian poet and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who had fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.

It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians viewed Georgians in much the same way that Georgians view Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking away their independence. "We are much more worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian imperialism," an Ossetian leader, Gerasim Khugaev, told me. "It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time."

There's more where that came from.

I don't know Dobbs, and I have no idea what biases he may or may not be bringing to his writing. But if John McCain and his friends are suggesting that this conflict is vitally important, we really need know just what the hell it's all about.

Quick Tips on Rhetoric

Dear Mr. Bush,

It may be easier to get people to believe you mean it when you say "the Cold War is over" if you can stop referring to the forces in opposition to Russia as "the free world." That's pretty much a Cold War term, see?

Similarly, you might ask Condi to stop talking about Czechoslovakia and 1968.

Talk like that will just convince people that what you really mean is that you really would like to renew the Cold War, if only to distract people from that Global War on Terror thing.

Speaking of which, you and John McCain might want to drop that line about how this is the 21st century, and countries don't invade other countries, occupying capitals and overthrowing governments. Jon Stewart and his staff are talented and competent; they don't need you writing laugh lines for them.

Enjoy the stay on the ranch.

P.S. Whatever you do, don't go here:

My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.

Golly, remember the good old days when 9/11 had "changed everything'??

I knew McCain occassionally got confused about important details, but has he really forgotten the collapsing towers, and the last seven years? Seriously?

Are we supposed to just dump that whole fear-of-global-jihad thing now? And rush to the stalwart defense of Stalin's birthplace?

Someone want to remind me why John McCain is supposed to have credibility on foreign policy and national security issues? Anyone?

Bueller?

By the way, is it too soon to start asking "Who Lost Georgia?"

Presumptuous?

Are we going to be hearing that John McCain is presumptuous? When Obama was overseas just chatting with allies, we certainly got an earful.

Did we repeal the bipartisan foreign policy dictum that "we have one President at a time", particularly during international crises? John McCain seems to think so.

McCain said he's been on the phone with the president of Georgia and complained that the Russians used "some minor conflict" as an excuse to launch a well-planned military operation. (In a conversation with the Tribune, McCain said he has spoken to the Georgian president every day.)

Now he's saying that his campaign surrogates Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham will be dispatched to Georgia.

I know I've been away for a few days, but Condi Rice is still Secretary of State, right?

I'm Kind Of Confused

So, the FBI wants me to believe that the research center used by the US Army to research (and weaponize) some of the world's most awful diseases is the kind of place where a guy who is on anti-psychotic medication and having paranoid or dissociative feelings is allowed to work alone at all hours, with access to the equipment to create a highly sophisticated dry particle form of anthrax at a time of widely hightened security following the most traumatic attack on the nation in a generation?

And they further want me to believe that, even though this guy, who was actually an anthrax vaccine researcher, was doing all this weird stuff like mailing packages under assumed names, and traveling to visit sorority houses, the FBI spent time focussed on another guy completely, to the point where the Attorney General mentioned that other guy in a press conference, though now we know that guy was nearly six-million-dollars worth of not the right guy?

About the only thing that I find plausible about the case I've heard against Bruce Ivins is that the FBI knew from the earliest days that the anthrax came from Ft. Detrick, but didn't think it was their business to mention that fact while half of Washington, including the President and Secretary of State, were talking as if Iraq was the source. That sounds like Washington, DC to me.

More Like This Please.

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Heh.

I also like the line about the Hilton/Spears ad. Who's the candidate who's ready to lead? The one who's knows what he's talking about, or the one who's ignorantly waving tire gauges and airing stupid TV ads?

(Speaking of ignorance, who goes to a photo op to promote building nuclear power plants at the site of an infamous partial meltdown incident?? I guess John McCain's isn't a big Gil Scott-Heron listener?)