Russia and Georgia

[Harold Schiffman]

Russia and Georgia
August 17, 2008 4:26PM


Ineptitude in response to reality is anything but singular in
Washington these past years, especially when reality has shown the
unpleasant side of its face. Would that dismal failure were a one off
kind of thing, but in government one stupid move always begets
another, the other yet another, and pretty soon you wind up back where
some of us began, facing off with a country that really does have what
Bush nomenclature calls weapons of mass destruction.

Even so, Washington's belated response to the events of the last 10
days in Georgia struck me as particularly absurd, even for Washington.
The decision to send humanitarian aid to Georgia in military transport
accomplishes almost nothing good and a lot bad. To the Georgians it
will come as an impotent gesture arriving too late with the wrong
stuff. To Russians it will be perceived as more of the same American
military posturing on its borders which has been going on for 10
years, provoking them finally into doing what they are doing, now with
vengeance. Nor will the Russians fail to note the hypocrisy of what
has become the characteristic American touch, gunboat foreign aid. The
soldier delivering the medicine never goes home. Considering that we
have been bollixing up the world in so many ways these past 15 years,
I for one would like to think that a response something along these
lines would have been considered.

Look, this is a part of the world that not may of us beltway folk know
too much about, and it's complicated. There are about 5 people in this
city that speak the Georgian language and not many more who speak
Russian. The people who speak Russian don't count because they learned
to speak the language in the Defense Language Institute where the
vocabulary was mostly army, regiment, battalion, bomb, and despite
appearances, we don't think that this is the language which is likely
to defuse this situation which is troubling, if far from threatening
to our national security.

How did it all go down? The President of Georgia did a stint here in
our ivy league which not surprisingly left him delusional. Take a look
around down here DC side if you have any trouble understanding me on
this score. Putin. Well, Putin is Putin. Putin is going to do what he
thinks is in the best interests of Russia, we know that now. We tried
to get him to be an American but for some odd reason he didn't want
any part of that. We even offered to let Russia be like America, you
know, be like us or else, but he we couldn't budge the buggers,
especially after they started to reap the rewards from taking back
their oil companies from the Russian wannabe Rockefellers who hadn't
the good sense to give back 10% of what they were stealing.

So our policy on this latest crisis may surprise some of you people
out there in the malls of America, still doing your best to keep on
shopping just as I wanted you to do after the tragic events of 9/11. I
know it has been tough doing what you are doing without any money, and
your ingenuity in this regard frankly has been amazing. I know that
you would prefer that I unleash our Generals and get America moving
again. But the fact of the matter is we are stuck. We are stuck in
Iraq. We are stuck in Afghanistan. We are stuck period, just like you
are stuck in the mall without any money. We have sucked up all the
credit and the well is dry. It's probably a good thing too, because
thermo-nuclear wars can get ugly, very ugly.

Our new policy is that we are going to stay home, shut up, and let the
Georgians and the Russians work this one out between themselves. Too
much to hope for? In Megalomaniaville, you bet it is.

-- 
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