Coming back from the brink of death after a car bomb that put him in a coma, the Ingush president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov today dismissed his republic’s entire government.

Was it because he felt the leadership was not doing enough to stem the Islamist insurgency widely accused of destabilising this tiny territory and having tried to kill him?

For a Putin or Kadyrov, such a reaction to a summer of attacks that left hundreds dead over the summer and the president himself in the casualty ward, would be normal.

Yet for Yevkurov, who is not your average meat-headed Caucasus politician (having so far refreshingly refused to use the spectre of Islamism to justify cronyism and repression), the government failed not at counterinsurgency, but at law and justice.

According to him, “the cabinet had failed to alleviate the region’s widespread poverty which breeds violence”. Certainly, this sort of thing has been said even by Medvedev, but Yevkurov seemed to have been walking the talk: After all, was it mere coincidence that the attempt on Yevkurov’s life was made shortly after his well-publicised anti-corruption sweep?

Indeed, this blog has also consistently maintained that corruption, not religious radicalism, has been the biggest catalyst of violence in Ingushetia.

Moreover, the BBC’s Dom Rotheroe has just reported on the real and prosaic reasons why people take up arms in Ingushetia.

He writes that the local authorities often randomly round up young men to fulfil quotas and show that they are fighting the militants. In turn, their angry relatives join rebel groups:

“Some may do so out of religious belief, yet Magomed Mutsolgov of human rights NGO, Mashr, believes that at least 80% leave home because of revenge…In a society in which blood vendettas are part of a man’s honour, young male relatives of the deceased have to seek their own justice. They head into the hills to get a gun and take revenge. And while with the extremists, their ideology may shift accordingly”.

In a book written a half century ago, Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet diplomat who defected to the US in 1944 but later became disillusioned with the policies of his adopted homeland, wrote that Communism

“is a parasitic disease of the old order. It can be eliminated only by establishing a new order, and thus depriving the parasite of the nourishment on which it thrives”

The same could be said of the violence in Ingushetia today, which will only recede once deprived of its host: corruption, police brutality and institutionalised injustice.

“War in South Ossetia: Georgia started it”

Thus did today’s editorial in Britain’s Guardian say what almost the entire US media elite refused to do last summer. It referred to the comprehensive EU investigation that found the war to have been started by Georgia and not Russia, but could just as easily have been quoting this humble blog.

In a series of articles in August 2008, FPA Russia Blog exposed the blatant pro-Georgian bias of the US political class and  near hysterical anti-Russian propaganda spewed by mainstream news organs, when “the press’s credulity of official US government positions, easy embrace of jingoism and susceptibility to hawkishness reminded me queasily of its very similar performance in run up to the Iraq war”.

In an excellent commentary on the media’s complicity in the war, Glenn Greenwald denounced those “deceitful methods that permeate our political discourse, especially when it comes to demonizing America’s Enemy du jour“, methods which, as I pointed out last August, reinforced “to the uninformed viewer that it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade”.

Much of the media’s bias towards Georgia, whatever the true facts on the ground, was due to its love affair with the telegenic, fluent and media savvy president. Yet, as the Guardian shrewdly notes, “the ability to jump in front of a CNN camera does not confer on the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the gifts of a democrat”. Not surprisingly, however, his crackdown on civil society groups and political opposition received little mention.

For example when CNN’s White House correspondent Ed Henry breathlessly delivered the following lines (with a straight face):

“…What’s really going on is that Russia is trying essentially to reconstitute the old soviet union.bring back the old spheres of influence. if you take over Georgia today, what’s next? Could they then move into the Ukraine (sic), could they take over the Czech Republic? These are awful options that are on the table, but there’s a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

A year long EU probe was not necessary to unmask such claims as the nonsense that they are. But equally, perhaps not even such an investigation is enough to dispel the enduring anti-Russian sentiments nursed by the conservative-Atlanticist clique within Europe’s elite. This gang includes the usual suspects - a smelly alliance of right-wing pseudo-intellectuals (Bernard Henri-Levy) and past-their-prime freedom fighters determined to reinstate the Cold War that once gave them underdog hero status (Vaclav Havel). Just last week, that very group had issued a letter that compared Russia to Hitler’s Germany and urged the EU to defend Georgia at all costs.

In the wake of the report, that kind of comment becomes as ridiculous as the rubbish (so ably gathered by Greeenwald) that was spewed by John McCain:

[Putin] has exhibited most aggressive behavior, obviously, in Georgia. . . .We have to make the Russians understand that there are penalties for these this kind of behavior, this kind of naked aggression into Georgia, a tiny country and a tiny democracy.

and the Washington Post’s editorial board:

Part of the blame-the-victim argument is tactical — the notion that the elected president of Georgia foolishly allowed the Russians to goad him into a military operation to recover a small separatist region of Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili says, in an article we publish on the opposite page today, that the facts are otherwise, that he ordered his troops into action only after a Russian armored column was on the move. . . . Moreover, the evidence is persuasive and growing that Russia planned and instigated this war.

A year on, with a detente-minded Obama in the White House and the likes of Sarah Palin relegated to a museum of political curiosities, the EU investigation underscores just how much the GOP and the elite US media were on the wrong side of history.