I’m starting to feel a bit better out there. This morning, with a nice breeze keeping the body temperature down, I put in a five-miler and then felt good enough to hit the weights afterward.
That’s 12 miles for the week, so far, with a goal of 20 and two days left.
On the iPod: a podcast of Friday’s Bill Moyers Now program and a Wilco performance from DC.
For conservative pundits, it’s like a dream come true, a rerun of the good old bad days of the cold war, with a resurgent Russia rising and presenting itself as an easy bogeyman on the world stage.
As Russian tanks rolled into the break-away Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, we have been entreated to a chorus of belligerence from the right. An unnamed administration official — aren’t they always unnamed? — offered this to The Washington Post:
Explicitly evoking the Cold War era, a senior administration official said Russia’s “disproportionate” aggression “recalls variously the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and even the Soviet invasion of Georgia in 1922.”
“This kind of brutal attack has happened before against Georgia and against other countries that the Russians want to dominate,” the official said in a conference call organized following Bush’s brief remarks. The implication, he said, is that “Russia has the right to intervene anywhere in the former Soviet Union.”
Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post, compared the crisis to the one in 1938 that precipitated the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia (why do neocons always trot out the Nazi comparison?) and called it part of a grand strategy to “stop and, if possible, reverse the pro-Western trend on (its) borders” and “carve out a zone of influence within NATO, with a lesser security status for countries along Russia’s strategic flanks.”
Georgia’s unhappy fate is that it borders a new geopolitical fault line that runs along the western and southwestern frontiers of Russia. From the Baltics in the north through Central Europe and the Balkans to the Caucasus and Central Asia, a geopolitical power struggle has emerged between a resurgent and revanchist Russia on one side and the European Union and the United States on the other.
This is cold war logic without the international communist threat.
I am not excusing the Russians here. It seems pretty obvious that Putin and Co. were looking for an excuse to send in the troops, but the Georgians are not exactly innocent victims — or, at least, not the Georgian political class. The violence — which hits civilians hardest — is not acceptible on either side and must end.
This is the point that Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, made on the magazine’s Web site yesterday:
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was reckless to send in the military to subdue the Russian-leaning province of South Ossetia on Friday.
And Russia, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, responded with unnecessary force.
As in most modern conflicts, it is civilians who bear the brunt. There have been reports of more than 2,000 civilians killed already. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged Russia and Georgia not to fire on civilians, and to give them safe passage. Amnesty International warns that some of the attacks may already have constituted war crimes.
Russia does not have a legitimate claim here. It brutally subdued Chechnya, which was trying to secede from Russia. Georgia was trying to subdue a restive South Ossetia. What’s the difference?
Basically, there is plenty of blame to go around — with the Bush administration sharing a chunk of it. Fred Kaplan, on Slate, reminds us that the administration’s promise of NATO membership and American backing very likely emboldened the Georgians.
Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?
It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into
NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.
Wouldn’t the American public agree to something like that? Doubtful, especially with our troops mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, our ties to the Georgians preclude us from acting as impartial peace brokers.
That’s why the French have been so involved.
But, to get back to my original point about the neocons, what has been lacking in their various analyses has been an attention to context. The conflict is a complicated one that is tied to a host of issues, including the history of Russian domination of Georgia, the economics of oil and Russia’s desiare to rebuild its sphere of influence — and it has been brewing for nearly two decades.
As the Georgian journalist Margarita Akhvlediani writes in The Nation, the “conflict is rooted in the breakup of the Soviet Union.”
After Georgia gained independence in 1991, it immediately endured a breakup itself. In the early 1990s two regions–Abkhazia and South Ossetia–declared their independence. Civil war followed, and the Georgian government claimed Russia was helping fuel the conflict in the breakaway republics. In any case, the wars ended with no ultimate win: Georgian forces were unable to reclaim the rebel regions, and no country in the world would recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. For the next fifteen years, Russian peacekeeping forces have controlled a cease-fire agreement in both conflict zones. And while negotiations between the two sides continued, they were all but dead.
Last week, that frozen conflict became a hot zone, which then exploded into actual war. Soon after the Georgian artillery attack, Russian tanks entered Tskhinvali and Russian aircraft bombed Georgian military installations. The Russian Army was called in to help peacekeepers stabilize the situation. And the bombing of different parts of Georgia continues.
And, as she writes, it is the Georgian people who pay the price.
Last week’s stellar performance by Elvis Costello opening for The Police got me thinking about opening acts I’ve seen over the years. So, today’s Top Ten is a double list — the 10 best and the five worst.
Best opening acts:
Honorable mention: The Pretenders (for the Rolling Stones, 2002) — deserved better than an indifferent crowd; George Thorogood (for the Rolling Stones, 1981) — a good match for the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in history; Northern State (for Cake, 2002) — imagine the Beastie Boys as women; Holly and the Italians (for The Ramones, 1981) — great stuff; Sloan (for Jet, 2001) — quite impressive; Heart (The Eagles, 1980) — hot show; The Greg Kihn Band (for The Cars, 1979) — may have been better than the rather static headliners.
Worst:
A truly beautiful morning. The temperatures were perfect for a run, with a wide-open blue sky and a light breeze. I managed four miles, managed being the operative word. I’m not sure what the problem has been lately — some days I lack legs, the others wind — but I haven’t been able to push it. Part of it probably has to do with a light workout load recently, due to vacation and business in the office. And my diet has been terrible — my weight is up.
It is a farily discouraging stretch, especially with the Jamesburg 5K less than a month away. If I plan to run it and improve on last year’s 26:45 — let alone matching the 25 and change I ran in the South Brunswick 5K in November last year — I have to get more serious, push the miles and the pace and pay more attention to what I’m eating.
Music: Alejandro Escovedo, Real Animal
My column on race and the race has elicited a surprising number of responses. As I detailed in a post last week, the anti-Obama crowd has offered an interesting array of reasons for opposing the Illinois Senator — many of them legitimate — but the arguments tend to be marred by what I will call the “they do it, too” excuse.
I received a letter — yes, an actual letter — from a poet and teacher that I know, a political conservative who was disappointed and offended by my Dispatches column.
He identifies some reasons for his dislike and distrust of the Senator, including his ideology, “his cocksure demeanor” and his connections to his supporters. He calls him “an arrogant, narcissistic, professionally undistinguished (i.e, for POTUS), crypto-Marxist demagogue.”
This is harsh stuff that reads right out of the conservative playbook on how to attack Democrats over the years. But what makes it remarkable is his focus on what the black community thinks of McCain (only one in 20 blacks have a favorable opinion, he says), despite his resume — a fact worth discussing, but one used here to race the specter of black racism.
“That is racist; outrageous and racist, both,” he writes. “If only 5 percent of whites said they had a favorable opinion of Obama, not only would I buy your argument: I’d be shocked, embarrassed and angry, too.”
The 5 percent number is accurate, though misleading, implying as it does that 95 percent view McCain unfavorably. The poll, however, actually finds that 57 percent of blacks view him negatively — a decent majority but not damning.
Is it racism? Some of it may be. But it also is likely connected to anger over general Republican policies on race, affirmative action and poverty, the missteps of the McCain campaign and his willingness to pander during the last several years to the worst of the Republican coalition.
Black racism, however, does not address the issues I raise in the column. There remains a segment of the population — a significant segment — that will view Obama through the prism of race, which shades the way his personal attributes are seen.
Charles Blow deconstructed this argument on the op-ed page of Saturday’s issue of The New York Times, saying it is a vestige of the “murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure.”
If the percentage of white voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for a black candidate were only 15 percent, that would be more than all black voters combined. (Coincidentally, it also would be more than all voters under 24 years old.) That amounts to a racial advantage for John McCain.
And this sentiment stretched across ideological lines. Just as many white independents as Republicans said that most of the people they knew would not vote for a black candidate, and white Democrats were not far behind. Also, remember that during the Democratic primaries, up to 20 percent of white voters in some states said that the race of the candidate was important to them. Few of those people voted for the black guy.
Some might say that turnabout is fair play, citing the fact that 89 percent of blacks say they plan to vote for Obama. That level of support represents a racial advantage for him, too, right? Not necessarily. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic in the general election anyway. According to CNN exit polls John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote in 2004.
Race is a central element in this year’s campaign, even if we are talking about race in code. Arrogance can be translated as “uppity,” while experience — of which Obama has more than the current occupant of the White House, more than Ronald Reagan and at least as much as Jack Kennedy — allows the discussion to avoid saying what the right wing longs to say but can’t in polite company: Obama should know his place.
So, yes, race will be one of several determining factors this year — a sad fact of life in the United States 54 years after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of schools and 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
