Cheney accuses Russia of using brute force, intimidation over Georgia

Sunday 07th September, 07:29 AM JST

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Betzee at 04:40 AM JST - 8th September

what is the proper way to win a war?

Legally it's over when the enemy surrenders; hence the obvious problem in fighting insurgencies, specifically how do you know when you've won? Nobody's ever answered that......
Betzee at 04:50 AM JST - 8th September

Perhaps some of my recent posts have been unduly influenced by a recent re-viewing of Groundhog Day. Though released back in 1993, it was quite prophetic in presenting a world in which the members of our overtaxed volunteer army keep waking up in the same Middle Eastern sandbox while the folks back home, oblivious to the outside world, hang out at the shopping mall. The Russians know exactly what they can get away with under these circumstances.
GeorgeRoper at 05:04 AM JST - 8th September

Them Russian and Americans are as bad as each other, causing trouble around the world. Strewth, look after your own people and leave everyone else alone.

I think Dick Cheney is an idiot, he likes war.
Betzee at 06:10 AM JST - 8th September

My concern here, George, is that if the US and Russia go to war it will invalidate the "no two countries with McDonalds ever fought a war" hypothesis. I have invested a great of intellectual capital in sustaining it, and can't bear the thought of being proven wrong.
SezWho2 at 07:01 AM JST - 8th September

Betzee,

What about Argentina and the UK? Or did Buenos Aires fall to the Golden Arches only after the Falklands?
Betzee at 07:20 AM JST - 8th September

SezWho,

I don't know at what point Argentina's economy went into the toilet. Before that, however, it was under military dictatorship. Not that it would preclude McDonalds from setting up shop, but it may have been unattractive for other reasons (for example, inability to assure quality control of product when under pressure to use local food inputs).

What the hypothesis is really testing, as Tom Friedman explains, is whether there is a tip-over point at which a country, by integrating with the global economy, opening itself up to foreign investment and empowering its consumers, permanently restricts its capacity for troublemaking and promotes gradual democratization and widening peace.

It's quite relevant to this situation owing to the widely shared assumption that nobody will bite the hand which feeds them and therefore economic globalization provides a good check against armed conflict. But Putin has turned off the gas to Ukraine and it's become clear that he might well do the same to Western Europe (despite the loss of profits).
Betzee at 07:40 AM JST - 8th September

Sez,

The McDonalds hypothesis, formulated in the 1990s, very much reflects thinking at that time, namely we can remake the world through economic integration. Get everyone into the WTO and we're assured peace.

The events of 9/11 swept all that out the door and was replaced by the neoconservative view, which found voice in the GWB administration, that we could remake the world through the use of military force. Afghanistan and Iraq were intended to demonstrate that. Instead, well, we don't need to go there....

A resurgent Russia, where a good deal of the private economy is in the hands of criminal syndicates, challenges both of these already battered views and may well force the US to find yet another way to look at the world (and our ability to influence developments within it).
SezWho2 at 09:19 AM JST - 8th September

Betzee,

I think I always understood the McDonald's hypothesis, but I don't think I ever trusted it. The WTO would be powerless without a serious enforcement arm. I think this is the same problem that plagues the UN.

As I see it, peace is never assured, but the best chance for it is via world government. For the last century the spur to US military force has been the fear that some sort of "-ism" is going to be that form of government, whether communism, socialism or islamic fundamentalism. I think we have a countervailing notion that if we can just all be democracies that we'll get along fine without world government--which, I think, is not true.

Economics may not be a zero-sum game but on the way to net world gains if a community of democracies does not quickly bring greater parity, that community will fail. On the other hand, if it does bring greater parity, wealthy nations will comparatively suffer in the balancing process. Nations that have robust militaries will seek to delay the pace of change or stop it all together. And this will be an incentive for war.

The US has no current intention of placing itself in an inferior position to a world government. Most people in the US, it seems to me, have been indoctrinated into the notion that such a state of affairs is unthinkable. They are not even willing to work toward that as a conceptual goal. There is this notion that we are number 1 and must stay number 1 and that is a formula for disaster.

It seems to me that soft diplomacy would have been the better way to handle Russia. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, first Clinton then Bush basically tried to isolate Russia by expanding NATO--all the while pretending to court it with the G7. The idea seems to me to have been curtailment of the strength that Russia has exerted in nearby countries for many centuries. That was probably as big a mistake as it would have been to try to teach China about the meaning of civilization.

In any event, Cheney accuses Russia of using brute force against a neighbor. There apparently is an exemption in this doctrine for Israel, or for our many transgressions in Central America and Cuba--or maybe the key is that brute force is OK if you don't use it on a neighbor. Intellectually, Cheney's remarks strike me as nonsense.

I'm not sure of what your remark about Russian criminal syndicates is apropos. More cynically, I'm not sure what we mean by criminal or if there is not a necessary relationship between money and criminality:

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties

Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise

-Bob Dylan
Betzee at 10:03 AM JST - 8th September

SezWho,

Thank you for your detailed response. Broadly speaking, where one stands on Russia's actions reflects who you think violated the status quo. Was it the US, putting in missile shields and attempting to get Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO, or Russia's disproportionate response to Georgia's ill-advised provocation? Moscow used reports of ethnic Russian civilians being killed and ethnically cleansed in South Ossetia to defend its actions to the world, asserting "R2P" or the "Responsibility to Protect."

I'm of the view that governments behave in ways they think they can get away with. Russia thinks it can withstand international criticism to accomplish its objectives, again whether they constitute legitimate defense needs or reflect the behavior of an aggressive, rising hegemon is a matter of dispute.

There is this notion that we are number 1 and must stay number 1 and that is a formula for disaster.

This view is associated with Paul Wolfowitz in particular. But the fact we appear to be losing ground in Afghanistan, after seven years, and our gains in Iraq are "fragile and reversible" according to Petreaus, probably emboldened Moscow.

I'm not sure of what your remark about Russian criminal syndicates is apropos. More cynically, I'm not sure what we mean by criminal or if there is not a necessary relationship between money and criminality:

I wasn't referring to crony capitalism but the activities of organized criminal groups engaged in sophisticated counterfeiting operations.
Betzee at 10:12 AM JST - 8th September

I thought this article, paragraph pasted in below, to be a good synopsis of the situation:

The war in Georgia...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 in Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. 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 Russian cooperation. 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 fifteen years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified. Whether the US and its allies can mount a coherent response has now become a central question of Western foreign policy.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21772
CavemanLawyer at 01:36 PM JST - 8th September

Cheney says the the Russians use brute force. Does that mean the Georgians were shooting "love bullets" when they fired the first shots?

--Cirroc
adaydream at 01:58 PM JST - 8th September

Cheney accuses Russia of using brute force, intimidation over Georgia.

Somebody slap the snot right out of cheney. The brute force that Russia used was nothing compared to what the US used against Iraq. < :-)

Moderator: Iraq is not relevant to this discussion.
CavemanLawyer at 04:24 PM JST - 8th September

adaydream, when the pot calls the kettle black, at least the kettle can claim it was actually attacked before lashing out. Dick "pot" Cheney does even have that much!

--Cirroc
SezWho2 at 06:24 AM JST - 9th September

It seems to me that when one country (the country of the first part) accuses another country (the country of the second part) of a series of aggressive moves, then the aggressive moves of the country of the first part are quite relevant to the discussion.
Philosophy187 at 11:04 AM JST - 13th September

Cheney accuses Russia?. . .I fail to fathom how a War Criminal can accuse anyone of anything.