Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Great Olympics Debate

Two counter posing views on what Britain's Olympics success means.

In the Blue corner we have Peter Hitchens, a man for whom the glass is always half empty:

"Isn’t this British Olympic boasting all rather East German?

Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival.

But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all. [...]

East Germany had a similar aim when it spent millions to produce medal winners.

The country itself was a backward, dirty dump, run by horrible old men and women, shrouded in a smog of two-stroke exhaust, brown coal smoke and cabbage fumes.

But at the Olympics it managed to appear to be modern, clean, youthful and bright.

And we have to pretend that Olympic success matters, just as they did, because we have nothing else to be proud of.

We achieve this by levying a tax on the sad, the deluded and the hopeless, called the National Lottery, and spending the money bamboozled out of these poor people on velodromes where cyclists dressed as spacemen whizz endlessly round under the cold gaze of ruthless trainers.

And how odd it is that all this effort, all this money and talent should have been devoted to succeeding in a contest which is, deep down, quite meaningless.

Politicians of all the Liberal Elite parties join in praising the way it has been done. Yet if anyone advocates the same methods in our State education system – ruthless selection, encouragement of the best, harsh discipline, no tolerance of failure – he is dismissed by the same politicians as an ‘elitist’.

Well, excuse me, but isn’t it far more important that we survive as an economy and a society in this hard, competitive and increasingly merciless world than that we gain a few shiny knick-knacks in an athletics meeting?

Let John Major, Michael Gove, Gordon Brown, Tessa Jowell and the rest of the supporters of comprehensive schools and diluted exams and socialised university entrance apply their principles to Britain’s 2012 Olympic team.

Your parents went to university? You’re rejected, so as to give an opportunity to someone who can’t swim as fast but needs encouragement.

You went to a private school? You’re rejected, too. We can’t have any privilege here, even if your parents bankrupted themselves to pay the fees. Your place will go to someone slower and less fit.

You passed a tough test way ahead of the others? Sorry, you’ll just have to go at the speed of the slowest in a mixed-ability training squad.

You’re talented but you live in a poor area? Too bad. All our best training schemes are in rich suburbs.

Your training is constantly interrupted by bullying, swearing and loutish behaviour? Too bad. Here’s a copy of our ‘anti-bullying policy’.

You’re doing really well? No help for you, then. Our concern is for equality, not excellence.

You’re slow, undisciplined, disruptive and no good? Have a special trainer and lots of resources.

If we nurtured our Olympic hopefuls the way we educate our children, the only role they’d have in any Games would be sweeping up litter in the stadium.

I have seldom seen a better example of an entire country getting its priorities wrong.

The day will come, and quite soon, when we win no medals and realise what we have become.

But I suspect, by then, it will be too late.'


Hoorah for Hitchens! When the country's basking in the sunny glow of all of those golds he comes along with a ruddy great black storm cloud.

In the red corner we have the New Labour apologist and Times Columnist, David Aaronovitch:

"One must be empathic. If I was a rank-and-file reactionary Conservative, forced to swallow political failure for more than a decade, and now permitted, lizard-like, to come out of my smelly culvert to claim a place on the sunny rock, I might let the light go to my head too. I might preen my scales and tell tales of the decline - no, the breaking - of Britain under Labour.

But one can take empathy too far. It seems impossible to counter the triumphal gloominess of the old Right with anything as feeble, as unconvincing, as facts. The best figures available show crime has gone down, but we know, we know, we know it has gone up! The best figures available suggest improving performance at GCSE and A levels, but we know, we know, we know that this is because of a dilution in standards!

Then along come the Olympics, and the national narrative, for a moment, no longer favours the lizard class and its story of decline. So let me make the most of it, in this short interval before pessimism sets in again. In 1996, after 17 years of Conservative government, the past six under the premiership of the cricketing Major, Great Britain went to the Atlanta Olympics and won precisely one gold medal. We ended that Games in 36th position, just behind Ethiopia and just ahead of Belarus. It wasn't just that Greece did better than us - Kazakhstan got four golds. If one were to take the Olympics as any kind of indicator of national health (and why should we not?) we would have to conclude that the past 12 years have been very well spent. And if Gordon Brown is to get it in the neck for every ill, real and imagined, why should he not get some credit for this?

Of course, I know it's not as simple as that, and I can acknowledge that the National Lottery, set up by John Major in 1994, is likely to have been a big factor in our changed sporting fortunes. But however we divide up the accolades (other than to the sporting men and women themselves), what seems clear, to me and to Boris Johnson, is that this success hardly points to our living in some kind of brutalised, boneless pre-dystopia.

[...]

If the “broken society” only means that there are places where there is too much poverty and crime, and that any death caused by a knife or a gun is a tragedy then, this side of Paradise, it means nothing. This is the peculiarly irritating aspect of the phrase. To take just one side of modern Britain with which I am familiar now that my drinking days are over, hundreds of thousands of Britons are involved, as participants or supporters, in scores of sporting events: marathons, half-marathons, ten-kilometre runs, bikeathons, triathlons, duathlons, from Orkney to the Isle of Wight. Some are athletes, some are motivated by charity, some - like me - are recovering lard-arses. Are they part of a broken society?

I was struck this week by Adam Sage's story in these pages about the French families who are sending their children to learn English by staying with British families in France. They speak English in the home and then go horse-riding in the safety of France. “I don't want to say bad things about Britain, but you do hear horror stories about children sent to stay with families there,” remarked one French teacher. But I would be prepared to bet that what really motivates such Gallic fearfulness is media coverage of the supposed brokenness of Britain.

Fine. How many times have we been told that there are two Olympic-size swimming pools in the whole of Britain and 29 (or something improbable) in Paris alone? So how come we came third in the swimming medals and the French came ninth? Are they 20 times as broken as we are?

The lizards may get their new government. If so it should begin its rule by admitting what its predecessors - the party of 2012 - got right."

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Obama vs McCain

Like many non Americans watching the presidential contest, if I'm honest with myself, the emotional side of me wants Obama to win. The young charismatic black contender winning the election is a more inspiring and exciting result than it's alternative a very old white guy becoming President of the United States. So when I read that McCain is leading in the opinion polls my heart kind of sinks. Now this isn't really rational I admit it, but I still can't quite shake it. Anyway, this is all by way of introducing this opinion piece in the FT which gives some hard and realistic advice to Obama - ditch the poetry and promise to defeat evil:

Tips for Obama: no poetry, promise to defeat evil

By Edward Luce

At the civil forum on faith last week, Barack Obama was asked whether evil existed and, if so, whether we should “ignore it, contain it, negotiate with it or defeat it?”

The Democratic presidential nominee gave a nuanced answer that suggested that evil “should be confronted” but that we should have “some humility” in doing so “because, you know, a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil”.

John McCain’s answer was: “Defeat it.” Although the Republican nominee followed up with his trademark promise to follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell”, all that anybody will recall is that Mr McCain answered the question in two plain words. And that Mr Obama did not. The same pattern was repeated when they were both asked when human life begins. “At conception,” said Mr McCain. “This, that, the other, and every other Tuesday,” said Mr Obama (OK, that was a paraphrase).

Leaving aside whether these are remotely appropriate questions for campaigning politicians (this is America, remember), most thoughtful people would prefer Mr Obama’s calibrated musings on matters of such complexity. But as Adlai Stevenson, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate, once quipped after being told that thinking people were supporting him: “Yes, but I need to win a majority.” He never did.

At next week’s Democratic convention in Denver, which promises to be the grandest convention since John F. Kennedy pipped Mr Stevenson to the nomination in 1960, Mr Obama will have his biggest opportunity so far to silence those who doubt his ability to speak in simple declarative sentences to ordinary voters. It is an opportunity he must not flunk.

Mindful of what happened to the Hamlet-esque candidacies of Al Gore and John Kerry, even some of Mr Obama’s strongest supporters are beginning to doubt whether he can. Take this, not untypical, offering from Margery Eagan, a self-confessed “Obama cheerleader”, in Friday’s Boston Herald: “I wish he’d save nuance and sanctimony for senior seminars; give America some straight answers; crack some jokes at his own high-horse expense; convince me he’s up to this . . . That’s what McCain’s done lately. It’s working.”

The auguries are mixed. By choosing to move his acceptance speech in Denver next Thursday from the convention hall to the Invesco stadium, because the latter can accommodate 75,000 people, Mr Obama has signalled that he plans to deliver one of his Berlin specials. Some Democrats believe that another mellifluous, highly oratorical Obama address to a mass adoring rally is precisely what will turn off the blue-collar voter.

As Bill Galston, a veteran of Democratic campaigns, puts it: “If Obama’s speech scores high on artistry and aesthetics, then we have a problem, Houston.” Better for Mr Obama to swallow his instincts and model himself on George W. Bush, whose constant repetition of simple themes – short on artistry and sometimes even grammar – broke through to the average voter.

“George W. announced his candidacy with a list of four or five promises of what he would do as president,” says Mr Galston. “Eighteen months later he was still repeating the same list in the same words.”

In his struggle to portray himself as empathetic to middle-class Americans’ needs, Mr Obama may be tempted to believe that Mr McCain has already done some of his work for him. By failing to recall, in an interview on Thursday, how many houses he owned and then asking his staff to check on it, Mr McCain presented his opponent with something of a windfall. The correct answer was “none” because all eight of the McCain properties are in the name of his wealthy wife, Cindy.

But such windfalls do not come often. And given most people’s low expectations for his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Minneapolis the following week, all Mr McCain will need to do is give a clear address having avoided falling over on the way to the podium. Beating low expectations is another Bush speciality. Exceeding high ones, as Mr Obama must do, is a more serious challenge altogether.

Here is a simple outline of what Mr Obama should do. Many people doubt whether he can emulate Bill Clinton’s ability to persuade voters that he can “feel their pain”. Such people are now being told by the McCain campaign that Mr Obama is an “arugula [rocket]-eating, pointy-headed professor type” who lives in a “frickin mansion”.

Mr Obama should therefore do what quiche-eating Ivy-League types are not supposed to do and display some real anger. He should postpone until the presidential inauguration next January any more suggestion that “we are the ones – the ones we have been waiting for” and remind people in simple terms of who he is and then link it with what he intends to do. He must spell out again and again that he was raised by a single mother who relied on food stamps.

He should contrast this with Mr McCain’s privileged background as the son and grandson of admirals and the spouse of a woman worth more than $100m. And he should promise to defeat evil. That always goes down well. Then he should get up the next day and do the same thing all over again. And again. Until we are all saying it in our sleep.

The writer is the FT’s Washington bureau chief "

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

British anti-Americanism 'based on misconceptions'

British anti-Americanism 'based on misconceptions'
Telegraph
18 Aug 2008

British attitudes towards the United States are governed by ignorance of the facts on key issues such as crime, health care and foreign policy, according to a new survey.

A poll of nearly 2,000 Britons by YouGov/PHI found that 70 per cent of respondents incorrectly said it was true that the US had done a worse job than the European Union in reducing carbon emissions since 2000. More than 50 per cent presumed that polygamy was legal in the US, when it is illegal in all 50 states.

...

Asked if it was true that "from 1973 to 1990 the United States sold Saddam Hussein more than a quarter of his weapons," 80 per cent of British respondents said yes. However the US sold just 0.46 per cent of Saddam's arsenal to him, compared to Russia's 57 per cent, France's 13 per cent and China's 12 per cent.

more...

Arts subsidies - for or against?

I find this a fascinating question: should the Arts, predominately enjoyed by the rich and the middle classes, be funded by Tax payers' cash?

Self identified leftwing commentator Oliver Kamm argues in defence of Opera subsidies (comments are interesting):

"In defence of opera subsidies

There used to be a Tory MP called Terry Dicks. He was so crude a right-wing populist that even Teddy Taylor, a veteran pro-hanger and anti-European, urgently disassociated himself from Dicks's views. Dicks's pet cause was hostility to public subsidy to the arts. The late Tony Banks said of him: "When he leaves the chamber, he probably goes to vandalise a few paintings somewhere. He is to the arts what Vlad the Impaler was to origami ... He is undoubtedly living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can be elected as a Member of Parliament."

So I immediately thought of Dicks when I read Fraser Nelson of The Spectator referring - without irony - to opera subsidy as a middle class rip-off. Dicks was the last person I remember using that argument. Here's how Fraser resurrects it:

"Great moment on the Today programme this morning when John Major – without irony – told James Naughtie how great the National Lottery was because an opera lover like him could benefit from the money poured into the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. That deal was perhaps the most egregious example of cash transferred from poor people to rich people, but sadly typical of the regressive nature of arts funding. I can understand the logic behind supporting indigenous arts lest they die out, but why have British taxpayers subsidise the singing of songs written a hundred years ago in Italian or German? If the usually-rich people who tend to watch opera do not wish to fund the real cost of it, I have never seen why hard-pressed taxpayers should cover a chunk of the ticket price. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy opera, I just don’t see why other people should subsidise my night out any more than they should subsidise my holiday."

Oh dear. Leave aside the cultural nationalism and the assumption that opera is an activity for the affluent; if Fraser believes the value of a night at the opera is the recreation he gets out of it, then at a minimum he has misperceived the economics of the transaction. If the state were to withdraw from subsidising opera from taxation - and the lottery is of course a voluntary levy - then the cost of it would simply not be met by those who attend. The gap would be filled by business sponsorship, with a bias against new and experimental productions. Imagine the vacuous populism of Classic FM on, literally, a grand operatic scale.

If you think that opera is just an individual consumption good like your holiday destination, then that won't trouble you. But if you consider the arts are a public good, and not only a private choice, then there is an impeccable liberal case for subsidy, understood as "a network of implicit contracts, which it would be prohibitively expensive to negotiate explicitly, both because of transaction costs and because of the incentive to act as a free rider and leave others to finance the activities of which one privately approves". (The quotation comes from Sir Samuel Brittan, who uses the example of arts subsidy, in his book The Role and Limits of Government: Essays in Political Economy, 1983, p. 56.)

Posted by Oliver Kamm on August 19, 2008

Friday, August 15, 2008

To spell or not to spell...

... that is the question. Ken Smith, Senior Lecturer in Bucks University, argues that we should accept commonly misspelt words as 'variant spellings':

"Just spell it like it is

7 August 2008

Don't let students' howlers drive you mad, says Ken Smith. Accept their most common mistakes as variant spellings ... and relax

Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students' atrocious spelling. Aren't we all!?

But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.

The spelling of the word "judgement", for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of "judgment", so why can't "truely" be accepted as a variant spelling of "truly"?

As a starting point, may I suggest the following ten candidates, which are based on the most commonly misspelt words by my students:

- Arguement for argument. Why do we drop the "e" in argument (and in judgment) but not in management? We do not pronounce "argument" "ar-gum-ent", so why should we spell it this way?

- Febuary for February (and Wensday for Wednesday). We spell the word "February" the way we do only because it is taken from the Latin word februa, the Roman festival of purification. Similarly, the "correct" spelling of the word "Wednesday" comes from the Old English Wodnes daeg, or Woden's day. But why should we still pay homage today to a pagan god or a Roman festival of purification?

- Ignor for ignore. The word "ignore" comes from the Latin ignorare meaning "to know" and ignarus meaning "ignorant". Neither of these words has an "e" after the "r", so why do we?

- Occured for occurred. There is no second "r" in the words "occur" or "occurs" and that is why nearly everyone misspells this word. Would it really upset you to allow this change, and if so why?

- Opertunity for opportunity. This looks odd, but in fact we only spell "opportunity" as we do because in Latin this word refers to the timely arrival at a harbour - Latin portus. However in Latin this word is spelt obportus not opportus, so, if we were being consistent, we should spell "opportunity" as "obportunity".

- Que for queue, or better yet cue or even kew. Where did we get the second "ue" in the word "queue"? Its etymology is obscure. But, etymology or not, why do we need it?

- Speach for speech. We spell "speak" with an "ea". We do not have to but we do. Since we do, let us then spell "speech" with an "a" too, to coincide with the spelling of the words "peach", "preach" and "teach". Both words come from the same origin - the Old English spechan - which, therefore, does not support either the "ea" or "ee" spelling.

- Thier for their (or better still, why not just drop the word their altogether in favour of there?). It does not make any difference to the meaning of a sentence if you spell "their" as "thier" or "there", and the proof of this is that you are always able to correct this. "Thier" would also be consistent with the "i" before "e" rule, so why do you insist on "their"?

- Truely for truly. We don't spell the adverb "surely" as "surly" because this would make another word, so why is the adverb of "true" spelt "truly"?

- Twelth as twelfth. The "f" word. How on earth did that "f" get in there? The answer is Old English again: twelf is related to the Frisian tweli, but why should we care? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with an "f" in them (as "stealfth" and "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in "twelfth"?

I could go on and add another ten words that are commonly misspelt - the word "misspelt" itself of course, and all those others that break the "i" before "e" rule (weird, seize, leisure, neighbour, foreign etc) - but I think I have made my point.

Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such.

Remember, I am not asking you to learn to spell these words differently. All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling."

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Georgia invaded by Russia over South Ossetia

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
George Friedman
August 12, 2008

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

THE MYSTERY BEHIND THE GEORGIAN INVASION

In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate.

The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well — indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow’s calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.

THE WESTERN ENCIRCLEMENT OF RUSSIA

To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion — publicly stated — was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo’s separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts — including demands by various regions for independence from Russia — might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia’s requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

RESURRECTING THE RUSSIAN SPHERE

Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

'The Forsaken'

'The Forsaken' tells the true story of the forgotten Americans who during the great depression fled the USA in their thousands to make a better life in Stalin's Russia. Once there they soon became disenchanted with the communist life, but they found that Russia now considered them Soviet Citizens and they could never leave, many ended their lives in the Gulag.

Here is an extract from a review of the book(the reviewer is Richard Pipes does anyone know if he's a relation of Daniel?):

"This is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag. In Tim Tzouliadis's "The Forsaken" (Penguin Press, 436 pages, $29.95), their dismal story is told with great skill and indignation usually missing from Western accounts of communist Russia.

They came to Russia full of enthusiasm, bringing with them baseball and jazz, and eager to acclimatize. Russians found it difficult to believe the Americans' tales of woe when they saw their clothes, luxurious by Russian standards. And the migrants were themselves quite unprepared for the poverty and lawlessness which characterized life under Stalin, and in many if not most cases decided to leave. They soon learned, however, that when they surrendered their American passports upon stepping on Soviet soil (passports which were then used by Soviet agents in America), they had become, automatically, Soviet citizens. Protests and appeals to the American authorities qualified the émigrés in Moscow's eyes as troublemakers and led to their arrests, followed by confinement in concentration camps."