Fred Kaplan puts the situation in perspective, calling out the current Administration for its “feckless” “support” of Georgian Democracy and also asking a few pointed questions after today’s squawk of neocons called for…well, whatever they’re calling for:
A few counterquestions for those who rise to compare every nasty leader to Hitler and every act of aggression to the onset of World War III: Do you really believe that Russia’s move against Georgia is not an assertion of control over “the near abroad” (as the Russians call their border regions), but rather the first step of a campaign to restore the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe and, from there, bring back the Cold War’s Continental standoff? If so—if this really is the start of a new war of civilizations—why aren’t you devoting every waking hour to pressing for the revival of military conscription, for a war surtax to triple the military budget, and—here’s a twist—for getting out of Iraq in order to send a few divisions right away to fight in the larger battle? If not, what exactly are you proposing?
In an earlier post, several commenters wondered why I called neoconservatives like the Kagan du jour (Robert) intellectuals. It’s that they sit in their academic offices scouring the world for patterns to fit their ideology, without thinking about the sordid realities that complicate their lovely theories. So, we had a “benign domino theory” in the middle east, in which the fall of Saddam supposedly led to flowering democracy…and now we have a League of Democracies proposed to stand up to the world’s autocrats like Russia and China, thus a new meta-conflict (World War V?) to go along with the other meta-conflict proposed by the neos: World War IV, against the terrorist jihadis.
The fact is that we have squandered our resources and credibility in the empty pursuit of grand theories. The actual responsibilities of a superpower–which sometimes do include military action, as in Afghanistan in 2001 (and, I’d argue, in Iraq in 1991)–require far more careful and considered actions than this Bush Administration has practiced. They require the prudence of the first Bush Administration…in which the President refused to hop a plane to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall because he didn’t want to rub the Russians’ noses in it. Bush the Elder knew that he’d need their cooperation in the far more important work of reuniting Germany.
I suspect Karl Rove would have put Junior on the next plane to Germany. What a great photo-op for the next campaign! More to the point, I suspect Kagan (and his apparent disciple, John McCain) have a weakness for an ill-considered, blustery foreign policy that seeks neat divisions between friend and foe–a policy of gesture rather than thoughtfulness, of ideology rather than intricacy.
The high moral dudgeon on display today is an obscenity–not nearly as obscene as the Russian violence in Georgia, of course, but ghastly in its own way because it promises continuing American myopia and the policy puerility that–as we have seen in Iraq…and also, as Fred Kaplan argues, in Georgia–gets innocent people killed.