Russia

Now that the artillery smoke has lifted and Sarkozy and Medvedev’s 6 point ceasefire plan is imposed on Georgia, it’s time to figure out: what the hell happened between last Thursday and now?

Gary Brecher has the most elegant, if undeniably sociopathic, explanation:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

Except, there was more than one war; and which one you were following depended on where you lived.

The US media covered the Russian invasion of Georgia and its airstrikes on Gori, while the Russian media covered the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia and its attacks on Tskhinvali, its capital. And there was no overlap.

For example, on all of last night’s three major CNN news shows - the Election Center, Anderson Cooper 360, and Lou Dobbs Tonight - there was no more than one mention of Ossetia itself, of any Georgian atrocities or Ossetian refugees. It was all pictures of the aftermath of Russian raids on Gori, Russian tanks rolling into Georgia, with captions like “Russia invades”. Yet, as CNN itself reports in a paragraph buried on its website,  “up to 100,000 people are thought to have been displaced by the violence, which has left South Ossetia’s capital of Tskhinvali in ruins”. Moreover, as the brilliant journalist Margarita Akhvlediani writes, Reuters has reported that up to 2,000 civilians in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, are dead.

So why does CNN care more about Russian violence in Gori than Georgian violence in Tskhinvali?

Of course, a mirror-image situation exists in Russia, which has asserted that up to 1500 people have been killed by Georgian forces in South Ossetia as part of an alleged ethnic cleansing operation, and where the media have been largely quiet on the air bombing of the Gori apartment blocks. In the rare event that these reports have appeared on the Russian news (just as a minority of US shows, like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, have reported on Georgian attacks in Ossetia) they remained in the distinct minority. But it is notable that much of this selective coverage has been down to government censorship, with journalists who had been reporting on the sorties, like Russia today’s William Dunbar, being taken off the air.

What is troubling is the US media’s willingness to similarly tow the party line, but in the absence of any of the coercive measures, such as the state censorship, that the Russian press endures. There have been no William Dunbars on CNN, despite the fact that every report I’ve seen on the channel yesterday had been framed as “Russian invasion”, with endless clips of Saakashvili alleging Russian crimes etc, in a loop of totally pro-Georgian coverage. Georgia is a key US ally, the 3^rd largest troop contingent in Iraq, and occupies a strategic, oil rich zone. The self-policing in the US media, which has basically been uncritically promoting government talking points, is very disturbing.

To the uninformed viewer, it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade; in reality, they both did. In addition, there have been several mentions of Georgia as a fledgling democracy, but no mention of Saakashvili’s recent crackdown on the media and civil society. The US media has been guilty of a procrustean tendency to distil a messy conflict between two flawed states into a Manichean struggle between good and evil; as Campbell Brown said yesterday: “there’s much more at stake here than the freedom of a former Soviet republic and Russia’s attempt to big-foot itself back onto the World Stage”.

And how’s this for hysteria, from CNN’s breathless hack Ed Henry reporting live from the White House on Monday night:

“…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 theres a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

On distinct occasions, I noticed straight factual inaccuracies. For example, both Campbell Brown and Lou Dobbs consistently asked why Russia was refusing to agree to international demands for a cease fire, when in fact Russia had convened the UN Security Council for just such a ceasefire last week, only to be rebuffed by the United States. As an AP story from August 9^th, and quoted in Mark Ames’s excellent article for The Nation, put it:

“At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a Russian-drafted statement.

The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the United States, Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides “to renounce the use of force,” council diplomats said.”

Of course, there can be no room for such inconvenient nuance on CNN if the Georgian use of force in Ossetia and Abkhazia is not mentioned to begin with and the conflict is framed exclusively in terms of the Russian invasion.

In addition, there have also been no mentions of Kosovo, despite the fact that Russia widely sees the West’s sponsorship of Kosovo breaking from Serbia as a precedent for Ossetia breaking from Georgia.

As I have pointed out in my last post, the US and, to a lesser extent, British media have been very quick to jump on the Russia bashing, jingoist bandwagon, hungry for the reinstatement of the Cold War narrative. Here are two excellent articles exposing this tendency:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/08/how_russia_became_a_bear_again.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia1

Even more unnervingly, are we in fact witnessing the crystallisation of a ‘CNN effect’? On both Lou Dobbs and the Election Centre, Obama was criticised for not taking a strong enough stance on Russia in the wake of its invasion. Here is a sample quote from Campbell Brown from yesterday’s programme:

“John McCain…saw an opportunity here. He was quick to condemn Russia, he’s been keeping up the sort of steady drum beat. Obama a little more cautious, at least initially, in his statements. He’s since toughened up his stance. Should he have come out stronger right from the get-go?”

Yes, you are not mistaken: that was the word ‘drum-beat’, as in ‘drum-beat to war‘, used in a positive way, by a news host. Of course, McCain’s stance was to be expected, writes Mark Ames,

“considering McCain’s raving Russophobia, and his campaign team’s financial and ideological ties to Saakashvili. As has been reported, McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, neocon Randy Scheunemann, has a long financial relationship with Saakashvili to lobby his interests in the United States.

On Monday, only Obama had made any reference to Ossetia, and only Obama had called on Georgia to rein in its offensive there. Yet, some time after his comments were circulated, Obama made another press conference, this time being much harder on Russia.

While it is impossible to establish causality, I can’t help thinking that the press was at least partly responsible for pushing him into a more hard-line position. McCain’s hawkish position has been almost universally derided by the independent strategic and foreign policy community as irresponsible and inflammatory, yet it seemed to be endorsed by the mainstream media, who seem to love their drum-beating!

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. Have any lessons been learned? More importantly, is there some structural feature of the free press that explains this effortless falling-into-line? Does the Obama/McCain vignette show that press pressure can in fact actually escalate conflict?

So is it any wonder that, despite the fact that, as Mikhail Gorbachev writes in the Washington Post, that Georgian leaders badly miscalculated when “they could get away with a “blitzkrieg” in South Ossetia”, no matter how much “the quick and easy victory exposes the west’s lack of leverage over a resurgent Russia despite years of heavy American political investment in Georgia”, the war will have been a military victory for Russia, but a PR defeat.

In fact, so successful has been Saakashvili’s wooing of the Western media that, according to Mark Ames,

No one’s bothering to ask what the Ossetians themselves think about it, or why they’re fighting for their independence in the first place. That’s because the Georgians–with help from lobbyists like Scheunemann–have been pushing the line that South Ossetia is a fiction, a construct of evil Kremlin neo-Stalinists, rather than a people with a genuine grievance.

In an article headlined “Russia has Lost the War”, the online daily Gazeta ru reaches very similar conclusions, after an analysis of Russian, Georgian and Western press treatment of the conflic.t It suggests that another reason for Western press’s favourable treatment of Georgia was the relatively greater access and support it gave to foreign journalists, where Russia’s propaganda effort focused much more heavily on its own media.

Modern conflicts are fought in the ‘courtroom of public opinion’, as Adlai Stevenson said at the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s time for Russia to get media-savvy.

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FOLLOW THE OIL:

Something that surprised me was the candid (and frankly, quite callous) mention of oil interests as motivators of US interest. Here is CNN Anchor Campbell Brown explaining why Americans should care about Georgia:

Georgia is a vital gateway to the rich and untapped oil and natural gas fields around the caspian sea.to get to that energy market, you really have to go to Georgia. and look to the south - you have to go through Iran, not good. Go east or south, you run into Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, countries that to say the least are not known for stable governments. Go North, you hit Russia, which already controls much of the oil and natural gas being sold to Europe, and wouldn’t mind controlling more. That leads a little path to the north west across Georgia. Whoever controls Georgia controls the flow of oil and gas.

BEST SUMMING UP OF THE WAR:

Gary Brecher:

The bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

A QUESTION OF RUSSOPHOBIA?

As I was thinking about the reasons for US media coverage of the conflict, I read a very compelling and thoughtful rumination on Russophobia and the media from Timothy Post, an American buinessman and blogger living in Krasnodar.:

There’s a significant disconnect between what I see daily with my own eyes and what I read in the Western media. The question keeps bumping around in my brain, Why do so many people in the West hate Russia?

NOT ALL MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE WAS RUBBISH:

Post also has on his site a valuable run down of some of the best mainstream media coverage of the conflict, which is very much worth reading especially after hearing all the above tales of woe.

Ever in search of free food, my friend and I decided to attend the Atlantic Council’s talk entitled “Dealing with Russia to Rescue Abkhazia from the Brink”. As most of these things serve delicious deserts and canapés, I should’ve recognised this event’s paltry offering of nothing more than a bizarre choice of Snapple Iced Tea or Whole Foods brand cola as a bad omen. Alas.

The presentation, by a David L Phillips, read like an excruciating Greatest Hits compilation of bellicose anti-Russian posturing, Pavlovian nonsense, and Cold War-itis.

For those who don’t know or care about Abkhazia, good news!: it was hardly mentioned. Abkhazia wasn’t the point; the point was ‘dealing with Russia’. And, those wondering what that implies were quickly satisfied:

–sanctions of Russian businesses ‘illegally investing in Abkhazia’

–declarations of solidarity with Georgia

–boycott of the 2014 Sochi Olympics if Russia continues to ‘undermine Georgian sovereignty’

–“resistance to Russian Imperialism”

&c &c &c

As for the creepy Pavlovian factor, a constant undertow of “behaviour change” and “carrots and sticks” punctuated the meeting. Phillips spoke of how the west must “deal with Russia”, “changing its behaviour” of “obstructionism” and “neo-imperialism”. “Russian demeanour around the world”, he said, “calls into question its leadership”, as when Russia “misused its role” and “ambushed” German peace proposals. Thus, “well-intentioned countries” must step in and “present the Russians with a clear choice”: “play a constructive role” or else. Or better yet, don’t play any role at all, as “there is no way that Russia can be mediating in a conflict when it is a party to the conflict”.

Even the moderator observed that he “heard more sticks than carrots towards the Russians”.

A good rule of thumb is that whenever the words “imperialism” and “neo-imperialism” are casually bandied about; whenever countries are anthropomorphically defined as either “well intentioned” or “obstructionist” and referred to not with geographical place names but rather prefixed with definite articles, viz. “The Russians”; whenever this happens, chances are you are dealing with an ideologically driven rant, not a reasoned discussion.

As an Abkhazia expert in the audience pointed out, “the very title, ‘Restoring Georgia’s Sovereignty’, is prejudiced against Abkhaz interests….It will be received in Sukhumi as further evidence that there is no sympathy in Washington for the Abkhaz people. They are regarded as expendable”.

Phillips’s reply was phenomenally, defiantly meaningless: I agree that the title was prejudiced, “but it was prejudiced to the reader, not the writer”.

Of course, Phillips knows a lot about Abkhazia. More, in fact, than even its own people, who voted overwhelmingly for independence from Georgia but whose “core interests are best served as part of Georgia”, according to Phillips. Perhaps someone should tell them!

Apart from Abkhazia itself, the other conspicuous absentee from the discussion was Kosovo. In the report, Phillips briefly ridicules Russian officials for suggesting a ‘Kosovo Precedent’, but does not explain precisely why it is such an absurd notion.

After all, as Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal has noted, Abkhazia and Kosovo share many fundamental features.

When I asked him about this, Phillips said he didn’t have time to get into it and pointed to his paper entitled “Abkhazia is not Kosovo”, which I haven’t got round to reading yet. (A pro-Abkhaz reader has alerted me to a strong critique of Phillips’s article by George Hewitt, professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

However, it is clear that while Phillips believes that the interests of Kosovo Albanians are best served by being given their own state, exactly the opposite holds for the Abkhazians.

The point of my criticism is not Phillips’s position on Abkhazians independence. Like any civil war situation, the issue is extremely complex and must continue to be seriously and rationally debated; strong arguments can be made for both sides.

The problem with Phillips’s polemic is his Manichean, zero-sum view of Russian and American interests in Eurasia. For Russia to be “constructive”, it must renounce any interests in the region. And any such interests are immediately seen by the US as “challenges” warranting a robust Western “response”.

More dangerous still is his treatment of Abkhazia and Georgia as pawns in a great power confrontation between Russia and America. The report states that “Georgia has become a testing ground for the West’s resolve to advance democracy, security and free markets in the post-Soviet space”. For Russia, that is fighting talk.

Such hyperbolic rhetoric of democracy-spreading gives Russia exactly the ammunition it needs to accuse the West of orchestrating “colour revolutions” to spread its influence and then crack down on legitimate mass movements. Disturbingly, it is uttered at the highest levels.

I remember one day shortly after Georgia’s Rose Revolution, the US ambassador Richard Miles gave an intimate, closed door talk at a Harvard Junior Common Room about his role in the events of 2005. He was practically bragging about giving “my friend Misha” Saakashvili a call and offering him US Embassy services to print opposition leaflets and other help. The way he described it, Miles made it seem like the US was directly responsible for the whole thing. If a Russian official had been in the room listening, Miles’s speech would have confirmed all the vilest Putinite conspiracies about Western meddling in the ‘near abroad’ and democracy activists being one giant American ‘fifth column’.

Of course, the real truth could not have been further from Miles’s smug braggadocio, as a senior Georgian official later confided to me. Apparently, Saakashvili actually mistrusted the US ambassador and hated his insistence that any serious help from the US was conditioned on Saakashvili sitting down for talks with Shevardnadze. So, far from single-handedly saving the Revolution, turns out the US had actually been hedging its bets and pushing for a compromise with the Ancien Régime!

That is the kind of cautious real-politik that Russia understands. Thus, the sooner the US foreign policy establishment gets rid of propagandists like Phillips and casts off the ideological dressing from its actions, the sooner it will arrive at a dispassionate relationship with Russia based on amoral great power politics and mutual respect.