By DemocracyRules
“Backfield in motion”
As American military cargo-planes land in Tbilisi, and the Russkies withdraw, opportunity abounds.
The Georgia-Russia War is causing changes so rapid it's as if Muhammid Ali was playing chess. Within the conflict, small pieces are being exchanged, but it still seems to me that the Iranian Queen is the center-piece.
Poland has just signed an agreement towards hosting the US Anti-missile defense system. Russia is trying to buy Azerbaijani gas, to keep it out of the trans-Georgia pipelines. Ahmadinejad is in Turkey, ostensibly to talk business, acting all buddy-buddy, but I question the timing. Condi seems to be rushing as many nations as possible into NATO. The heat is off Iran at the moment, but for Israel the clock is still ticking, and they will do what they have to do, when they have to do it, no matter what other countries are doing.
Gates is very phlegmatic about the situation, which is good, this is no time to have the SecDef being a hot-head.
The other eastern European countries are very attentive and worried. They're like goats nervously watching one of their own being led to the slaughter house.
The Economist tries to sum it all up, but that's a hard stretch. Here are the highlights of their summary [With my comments in brackets.]
... In fighting Georgia, Russia fought a proxy war with the West-especially with America... All this was a payback for the humiliation that Russia suffered in the 1990s, and its answer to NATO's bombing of Belgrade in 1999 and to America's invasion of Iraq.
...It is impossible to say who actually started it. But, given the scale and promptness of Russia's response, the script must have been written in Moscow...
South Ossetia is a tiny patchwork of villages-Georgian and South Ossetian-which was easy to drag into a war. It is headed by a thuggish former Soviet official, Eduard Kokoity, and run by the Russian security services. It lives off smuggling and Russian money...
Russia was prepared for the war not only militarily, but also ideologically. Its campaign was crude but effective. While its forces were dropping bombs on Georgia, the Kremlin bombarded its own population with an astonishing propaganda campaign. One Russian deputy reflected the mood: "Today, it is quite obvious who the parties in the conflict are. They are the US, UK, Israel who participated in training the Georgian army, Ukraine who supplied it with weapons. We are facing a situation where there is a NATO aggression against us."
There was one difference, however. Russia was dealing with a crisis that it had deliberately created. Its biggest justification for military intervention was that it was formally protecting its own citizens. Soon after Mr Putin's arrival in the Kremlin in 2000, Russia started to hand out passports to Abkhaz and South Ossetians, while also claiming the role of a neutral peacekeeper in the region. When the fighting broke out between Georgia and South Ossetia, Russia, which had killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in Chechnya, argued that it had to defend its nationals...
The biggest victims of this war are civilians in South Ossetia and Georgia... But all Russia has got from its victory so far is a ruined reputation, broken ties with Georgia, control over separatist enclaves (which it had anyway) and fear [and loathing] from other former Soviet republics...
Yet the people who are likely in the end to pay the biggest price for the attack on Georgia are the Russians."
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My take is that Russia is toast, so let's get some butter and jam. Russia does genuinely feel encircled and threatened by advancing democracy, but by lashing out violently, they only tighten the noose.
Before Russia can hope to disentangle itself from this, it will become history. It's too small. It's GDP is about $2 trillion compared to the allied democracies with more than $34 trillion. Russia has about 145 million people, but only $2 trillion in GDP. Also, the Russian population is shrinking fast, and although their economy is growing, they have yet to recover from the economic meltdown of 1998.
But here's the key problem: If the Russian economy grows 10% this year, their GDP will rise to 2.2 trillion, an increase of $0.2 trillion.
Meanwhile, if the allied democracies grow by only 5%, $34 trillion becomes 35.7 trillion, an increase of $1.7 trillion. This annual growth is almost as big as the entire Russian economy!
We allied democracies can use some of our growing wealth to build more weapons to defend ourselves against Russia.
In this way, the growing number and wealth of the allied democracies will progressively leave Russia farther and farther behind us in the dust. The bear will become a cub.
The key short-term problem is keeping an infuriated Russia from giving NUKES TO IRAN.
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