August 11, 2008
SIFT FINER:
Where Europe Vanishes: Civilizations have collided in the Caucasus Mountains since the dawn of history, and the region's dozens of ethnic groups have been noted for "obstinacy and ferocity" since ancient times. Stalin was born in these mountains, and it was also here that the Soviet empire began to crumble. The story of the Republic of Georgia illustrates that the peoples of the Caucasus may prove as incapable of self-rule as they were resistant to rule by outsiders (Robert D. Kaplan, November 2000, Alantic Monthly)
EUROPE and Asia fuse along the shores of the Black Sea, but the Caspian Sea is all Asiatic. Between these two bodies of water is a land bridge where Europe gradually vanishes amid a 750-mile chain of rugged mountains as high as 18,000 feet. This is the Caucasus—Russia's Wild West. Here Russian colonialists since the seventeenth century have tried unsuccessfully to subdue multitudes of unruly peoples. To the west and southwest of the Caucasus lie the Black Sea and the most undeveloped part of Turkey; southeast lie the mountains and tablelands of Iran; east, across the Caspian Sea, are the desert wastes of Central Asia; and north lies Russia, shattered like much of the Caucasus by poverty and chaos following seven decades of communism. The northern slopes of these mountains, properly called the North Caucasus, contain various ethnic chieftaincies that are now part of the Russian Federation; the region to the south of the highest ridges is called the Transcaucasus—the land of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Balkans border Central Europe. The Caucasus has no such luck.Even before it did in Mesopotamia, civilization may have taken hold in the Caucasus, where there is an abundance of both water and vegetation, allowing for domesticable animals and agriculture. The mountainous terrain shelters miniature tribal worlds lost in time. The Greek geographer Strabo (64 B.C.-A.D. 23) noted that in the Greek Black Sea port of Dioscurias, now in the northwestern-Georgia region of Abkhazia, seventy tribes gathered to trade. "All speak different languages," he wrote, "because ... by reason of their obstinacy and ferocity, they live in scattered groups and without intercourse with one another." It was on Mount Caucasus, in Georgia, that Prometheus, punished by Zeus, was chained to a rock so that an eagle could continually peck at his liver. Prometheus, who created man out of clay, represents the pre-Olympian authority that Zeus toppled; the very antiquity of the Prometheus story, which is part of the creation myth of the Greek world, could be further evidence that the Caucasus was a cradle of civilization. One theory holds that the word "Georgia" comes from the Greek word geo ("earth"), because the ancient Greeks who first came to Georgia were struck by the many people working the land.
Today the Caucasus is shared by four countries and about a dozen autonomous regions with as many as fifty ethnic groups among them, each with its own language or dialect. Some are well known and numerous, such as the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azeri Turks of Azerbaijan, and the Chechens. Others are smaller and obscure, such as the Ingush, the Ossetes, the Avars, the Abkhaz, the Balkars, the Kalmyks, the Mingrelians, and the Meskhetian Turks.
In 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union, to which all of the Caucasus had belonged, set off a gruesome pageant of warfare, anarchy, and ethnic cleansing that engulfed the region for years and simmers still, with 100,000 dead and one and a quarter million refugees. No other region of the Soviet Union equaled the Caucasus in demonstrating how bloody and messy the death of an empire can be.
In the 1990s the American media and intellectual community embraced the causes of the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovar Albanians, but they virtually ignored similar instances of ethnic cleansing in the Caucasian regions of Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. [...]
Georgia is a small country by American standards, with 5.5 million people, comparable in area to West Virginia. But it is the most sprawling and ethnically various state in the Caucasus, with a long, complex, and bloody history. Situated in the geographic and historical crucible where Russia meets the Turkic and Persian Near East, the mountain ranges of the Caucasus have allowed the Georgians to remain linguistically intact over the millennia. Though they make up only one one-thousandth of humanity, the Georgians created one of the world's fourteen alphabets. Its crescent-shaped symbols emerged around the fifth century B.C., possibly from Aramaic, the Semitic dialect spoken by Jesus. Saint Nino, a slave woman from Cappadocia, in central Anatolia, brought Christianity to Georgia in A.D. 330, when she converted the Georgian Queen Nana after curing her of an illness. The Greek colonies around Batumi may have been converted as early as the first century, making the Christianity here among the world's oldest forms, combined as it was with the Greek pantheon, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and various Anatolian cults.
The Georgians were caught in that archetypal East-West conflict between the Persian and Greek empires that forms the subject of Herodotus' Histories. Later, in the early Christian centuries, Georgia became another East-West battleground, this time for the conflict between Persia and Rome. A pattern emerged that continues to this day: although Georgia was superficially influenced by the West (Greece and Rome), its political culture became profoundly Eastern. The difference between Rome and Persia (and later between Byzantium and Persia) was the difference between semi-Western imperial officialdoms that were nonhereditary, and thus early prototypes of modern states, and a Persian society underpinned by tribal and clan relations. In Georgia it was the Persian clan system that proved more influential, and that system's remnants are visible today in the power of regional mafias and warlords. Despite the influence of European Russia in the nineteenth century, Georgia can be considered part of the Near East.
Another pattern that emerged in classical times and continues is Georgia's internal disunity. After a millennium of conflict, in 1555 Georgia was divided between an Ottoman Turkish sphere of influence in the west and a Safavid Iranian one in the east, while the mountains to the north cut it off from its fellow Orthodox Christian Russia. Iranian oppression was so extreme that in the early seventeenth century the population of Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, dropped by two thirds because of killings and deportations. In 1801 Czar Alexander I forcibly incorporated Georgia into the Russian Empire. What happened next was more dramatic than much of the preceding history taken together.
The czars quickly put Georgia on the road to modernity. Its population rose from 500,000 to 2.5 million in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were costs, however. The Georgian Church and nobility became subservient to Russian institutions, and Russian absolutism sparked peasant revolts.
The Armenians played the role in Georgia that the Jews did elsewhere: that of urban middleman shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. Under Russia's modernizing rule the division of labor between rural Georgians and urban Armenians was accentuated. At the beginning of the twentieth century Marxism became attractive to Georgians because it provided both an analysis of and a solution to their condition that were non-nationalist on the one hand and opposed to czarist officialdom and the Armenian bourgeoisie on the other. Georgia, not Europe or Russia, was the real historical birthplace of mass-movement socialism, with support not just from intellectuals and workers but from peasants, too.
Utopian rhetoric by local Marxists notwithstanding, the weakening of czarist rule at the start of the twentieth century led to ethnic conflict among Georgians, Armenians, and Azeri Turks—exactly what would recur in the late twentieth century, when despite universalist calls by dissident intellectuals for democracy and human rights, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to chaos and ethnic cleansing. And there is another frightening similarity. In 1918 a weakened and defeated Russia spawned three new states built on old ethnic identities in the Transcaucasus: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All were destroyed in the 1920s, as Russia reasserted itself under the Soviets. Were Russia to reassert itself again under a new autocracy, the West would have to prove as muscular here as in Bosnia and Kosovo to keep these states alive.
Georgia embraced Russia in 1801 because Russia offered an opening to Europe along with protection against Turkey and Iran. Had the czars and the Menshevik socialists, with all their flaws, been allowed to continue and evolve in power, the Caucasus today might be a model of civility. What nineteenth-century Georgian would have thought that the Turks and the Iranians, however fundamentalist, would prove less destructive than the Europeanized Russians?
Another lesson of this tragic story is that although history, culture, and geography are the only guides to the future, they are still not determinative—because of extraordinary individuals. Turkish influence would have been better for Georgia than Russian, because Ataturk took a backward Turkey and made it modern, while Lenin and Stalin took a directionless Russia and made it backward. [...]
GEORGIANS are a very old ethnic entity, but we have no experience of modern statehood," said Alexander Rondeli, the head of a research institute connected to the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "We are a quasi-state." Rondeli, the doyen of Georgian intellectuals, is fifty-seven but looks older. With a grave and sardonic voice, a large physique, striking white hair, and thick black eyebrows, he was like the voice of history itself. Rondeli's viewpoint was both wise and ironic, but also overburdened by the sheer accumulation of knowledge and events.
"Nations often get what they deserve," Rondeli told me with a slight smile when we met at his office, "so to see what kind of government Georgia will have in the future, it is merely a matter of dissecting our national character. We are nominally Christian, but we have never been fanatics. We know how to survive, but not how to improve. Our church is pagan, politicized, and thus unable to move forward."
"Remember," Rondeli went on, "we had seventy-four years of political-cultural-economic emasculation under the Soviet Union. Three generations of Georgians were spoiled. The West concentrates on the crimes of Hitler, but the Nazis ruled for only twelve years."
50-0 FILES:
Penn in December 2007 on Plan for Two-Way Race Against Obama: "Release the Tapes" (Jake Tapper, August 11, 2008, ABC: Political Punch)
[P]laying out a number of scenarios, Penn writes that if they come out of Iowa and it's a two-way race with Obama, "on Friday we do a media interviews (sic) and basically say that he is unvetted, discuss his ever-changing positions. Release the tapes. Create immediate pressure that deprives him of oxygen.'
If there are tapes --of either Obama saying anything even mildly similar to the Reverend Wright -- it's important that they not come out until after the convention roll call.
WE ARE ALL INTELLIGENT DESIGNISTS NOW:
Extinction 'by man not climate' (BBC, 8/11/08)
The extinction of many ancient species may be due to humans rather than climate change, experts say.
Nature doesn't select.
TUG OF THE TRACES
Found in Space: How C. S. Lewis has shaped my faith and writing. (Philip Yancey, 7/22/2008, Christianity Today)
"My idea of God is not a divine idea," Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed. "It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. … The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins." That book, conceived as his wife lay dying a most cruel death from bone cancer, unsettles some readers. Lewis had dealt with theodicy philosophically in The Problem of Pain, but tidy arguments melted away as he watched the process of bodily devastation in the woman he loved. I believe the two books should be read together, for the combination of ultimate answers and existential agony reflects the biblical pattern. The Cross saved the world, but, oh, at what cost.Lewis saw the world as a place worth saving. Unlike the monastics of the Middle Ages and the legalists of modern times, he saw no need to withdraw and deny all pleasures. He loved a stiff drink, a puff on the pipe, a gathering of friends, a Wagnerian opera, a hike in the fields of Oxford. The pleasures in life are indeed good, just not good enough; they are "only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
I found in Lewis that rare and precarious balance of embracing the world while not idolizing it. For all its defects, this planet bears marks of the original design, traces of Beauty and Joy that both recall and anticipate the Creator's intent.
Alone of modern authors, Lewis taught me to anticipate heaven: "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea."
The Wife was making noises recently about getting an exchange student some year, so when I signed the youngest up for PlaySoccer camp I offered to host one of the coaches. They're mainly British kids who come over for 7 weeks in the summer and go from one town to the next, a week in each, staying with families and running soccer camps during the day. Went and picked ours up yesterday, a nice Polish fella who's attending the University of Southampton. He said how much he likes America because everyone is friendly and "life is good" here. Amen, brother.
EVERYTHING IS SUBJECT TO DARWINISM EXCEPT MY FAITH IN DARWINISM:
Evolution vs. Naturalism: Why they are like oil and water (Alvin Plantinga, July/August 2008, Books & Culture)
[W]hat evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behavior, (perhaps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that issues in survival and reproduction.Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn't, as such, care a fig about true belief. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents." Taking up this theme, naturalist philosopher Patricia Churchland declares that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; hence, she says, its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately:
Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive … . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.
What she means is that natural selection doesn't care about the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behavior. Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce. Consider a frog sitting on a lily pad. A fly passes by; the frog flicks out its tongue to capture it. Perhaps the neurophysiology that causes it to do so, also causes beliefs. As far as survival and reproduction is concerned, it won't matter at all what these beliefs are: if that adaptive neurophysiology causes true belief (e.g., those little black things are good to eat), fine. But if it causes false belief (e.g., if I catch the right one, I'll turn into a prince), that's fine too. Indeed, the neurophysiology in question might cause beliefs that have nothing to do with the creature's current circumstances (as in the case of our dreams); that's also fine, as long as the neurophysiology causes adaptive behavior. All that really matters, as far as survival and reproduction is concerned, is that the neurophysiology cause the right kind of behavior; whether it also causes true belief (rather than false belief) is irrelevant.
Next, to avoid interspecies chauvinism, let's not think about ourselves, but instead about a hypothetical population of creatures a lot like us, perhaps living on a distant planet. Like us, these creatures enjoy perception, memory, and reason; they form beliefs on many topics, they reason and change belief, and so on. Let's suppose, furthermore, that naturalistic evolution holds for them; that is, suppose they live in a naturalistic universe and have come to be by way of the processes postulated by contemporary evolutionary theory. What we know about these creatures, then, is that they have survived; their neurophysiology has produced adaptive behavior. But what about the truth of their beliefs? What about the reliability of their belief-producing or cognitive faculties?
What we learn from Crick and Churchland (and what is in any event obvious) is this: the fact that our hypothetical creatures have survived doesn't tell us anything at all about the truth of their beliefs or the reliability of their cognitive faculties. What it tells us is that the neurophysiology that produces those beliefs is adaptive, as is the behavior caused by that neurophysiology. But it simply doesn't matter whether the beliefs also caused by that neurophysiology are true. If they are true, excellent; but if they are false, that's fine too, provided the neurophysiology produces adaptive behavior.
So consider any particular belief on the part of one of those creatures: what is the probability that it is true? Well, what we know is that the belief in question was produced by adaptive neurophysiology, neurophysiology that produces adaptive behavior. But as we've seen, that gives us no reason to think the belief true (and none to think it false). We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2. But then it is massively unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability. If I have 1,000 independent beliefs, for example, and the probability of any particular belief's being true is 1/2, then the probability that 3/4 or more of these beliefs are true (certainly a modest enough requirement for reliability) will be less than 10-58. And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only 100 beliefs, the probability that 3/4 of them are true, given that the probability of any one's being true is 1/2, is very low, something like .000001.7 So the chances that these creatures' true beliefs substantially outnumber their false beliefs (even in a particular area) are small. The conclusion to be drawn is that it is exceedingly unlikely that their cognitive faculties are reliable.
But of course this same argument will also hold for us. If evolutionary naturalism is true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is also very low. And that means that one who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it. If there isn't a defeater for that defeater—a defeater-defeater, we could say—she can't rationally believe that her cognitive faculties are reliable. No doubt she can't help believing that they are; no doubt she will in fact continue to believe it; but that belief will be irrational. And if she has a defeater for the reliability of her cognitive faculties, she also has a defeater for any belief she takes to be produced by those faculties—which, of course, is all of her beliefs. If she can't trust her cognitive faculties, she has a reason, with respect to each of her beliefs, to give it up. She is therefore enmeshed in a deep and bottomless skepticism. One of her beliefs, however, is her belief in evolutionary naturalism itself; so then she also has a defeater for that belief. Evolutionary naturalism, therefore—the belief in the combination of naturalism and evolution—is self-refuting, self-destructive, shoots itself in the foot. Therefore you can't rationally accept it. For all this argument shows, it may be true; but it is irrational to hold it. So the argument isn't an argument for the falsehood of evolutionary naturalism; it is instead for the conclusion that one cannot rationally believe that proposition. Evolution, therefore, far from supporting naturalism, is incompatible with it, in the sense that you can't rationally believe them both.
To be fair, you can't rationally believe either.
NOT TO MENTION PAKISTAN...:
India as a US hedge against China (Jeff M Smith, 8/07/08, Speaking Freely: Asia Times Online)
And yet, history and national identity are notorious for trumping raw economic interests in Asia. Consider the most fundamental of inter-state relations: a shared border. China and India's has been under dispute for nearly a century, and China has been testing New Delhi this year with a wave of abrupt but underreported incursions into Indian territory. Beijing still claims tens of thousands of square miles of Indian territory in the Indian states of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, the subject of a 1962 border war.China's incursions, in some ways routine by now, have become more numerous (anywhere between 60 and several hundred) and brazen (one crossing having driven a kilometer into Indian territory) in the past six months - an unusual provocation, given China's sensitivity to world opinion ahead of the August Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
Were the border incursions an isolated incident, they would likely be swallowed by the mounting ties that bind China and India. But isolated they are not, and in 2006 a warning by China's ambassador to India put in question the warmth generated by a dozen of rehearsed summits: "[T]he whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory ... we are claiming all of that. That is our position." The point was not lost on the 1.1 million Indians living in a state the size of Maine. Indian diplomats from the state have even been denied visas by Beijing, which reminds them documentation is not required to travel their own country.
Ominous gestures like this add to the sense of anxiety generated by a host of Chinese policies in recent years. Years of Chinese military (and probably nuclear) assistance to India's arch-enemy, Pakistan, has earned it no friends in Delhi. Nor has China's assertive expansion into the Indian Ocean. Indeed, Beijing's plan to litter the South Asian coastline with a series of naval bases - its so-called "string of pearls" - has put India on the defensive in its own backyard. And abroad, a fierce competition for natural resources in Africa and beyond has swung decisively in China's favor, curtailing India's access to raw materials, and wounding New Delhi's pride.
Even the blossoming Sino-Indian trade relationship generates friction: where their account was only recently in balance, India has suddenly discovered a $10 billion trade deficit, ushering them into the same frustrated and indebted club as the US and European Union. Finally, China's expanding ballistic missile and space capabilities have kept Indian defense analysts on edge, as has China's clandestine submarine base on Hainan island.
MORE:
India's new challenges in Afghanistan (Harsh V Pant, August 11, 2008, Rediff)
It will be simplistic to assume that Pakistan just gave into Indian demands because of the rapidly deteriorating India-Pakistan and Pakistan-Afghanistan ties. More important is the pressure that the Pakistan government has come from the US in recent weeks. During Gilani's visit to Washington recently the Bush administration made it clear that its patience is running out with the shenanigans of Pakistan's security establishment and the role of the Inter Services Intelligence came under the scanner.
HAPPILY, THERE AREN'T MANY AROUND ANYMORE..:
Solzhenitsyn opened my eyes (Phillip Adams, August 12, 2008, The Ausralian)
I was a teenage communist. Australian commos were reluctant to hear the truth about Joseph Stalin. We preferred to see him as the heroic figure who defeated Adolf Hitler, far more important in the war against fascism than Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt. We romanticised Uncle Joe, as Australian soldiers called him, and grieved for the sufferings of the Russian people. Hitler's war machine had destroyed 10,000 villages and all but crushed Stalingrad and Leningrad. The sufferings of the Soviet people were epic. Millions dead. And we didn't want to know about the sufferings they endured because of Stalin.But when Nikita Khrushchev denounced his former patron, the truth, the horror, could no longer be denied. That truth would destroy the communist parties in the West, though some comrades kept the foolish faith until after Moscow crushed the Hungarian revolution or sent the tanks to roll over the Prague Spring.
There were, therefore, mixed feelings about the sainted Solzhenitsyn when he published his first accounts of the gulag under the patronage of Khrushchev during a brief Moscow spring. But as the terrible stories were revealed in book after book, with Solzhenitsyn winning the Nobel Prize and the second prize of exile in the US, no one had any excuse to romanticise Stalinism. Yes, many of the very old in Russia and younger ultra-nationalists remain devoted to Stalin's memory. But thanks to the courage of writers such as Solzhenitsyn the world knows that he was as great a brute as Hitler.
...but you can always tell the unreconstructed old communists by their continuing reverence and excuse-making for Stalin.
ALL ABOUT AESTHETICS:
The Pope Theologian Says: The Proof of God Is Beauty: The beauty of art and of music. The wonders of sanctity. The splendor of creation. This is how Benedict XVI defends the truth of Christianity, in a question-and-answer session with the priests of Brixen (Sandro Magister, 8/11/08, Chiesa)
Just like every summer, this year Benedict XVI met with priests of the area where he is spending his vacation. For an open question-and-answer discussion.The meeting took place on the morning of Wednesday, August 6, in the cathedral of Brixen, at the foot of the Alps, a few miles from the Austrian border. The pope replied to six questions, speaking partly in German and partly in Italian, the two official languages of the region. The meeting was held behind closed doors, without any journalists present. The complete transcript of the conversation was released two days later by the Vatican press office. [...]
Q: Holy Father, my name is Willibald Hopfgartner, and I am a Franciscan. In your address in Regensburg, you emphasized the substantial connection between the divine Spirit and human reason. On the other hand, you have also always emphasized the importance of art and beauty. So then, together with conceptual dialogue about God in theology, should there not always be a new presentation of the aesthetic experience of the faith within the Church, through proclamation and the liturgy?
A: Yes, I think that the two things go together: reason, precision, honesty in the reflection on truth, and beauty. A form of reason that in any way wanted to strip itself of beauty would be depleted, it would be blind. Only when the two are united do they form the whole, and this union is important precisely for the faith. Faith must constantly confront the challenges of the mindset of this age, so that it may not seem a sort of irrational mythology that we keep alive, but may truly be an answer to the great questions; so that it may not be merely a habit, but the truth, as Tertullian once said.
In his first letter, St. Peter wrote the phrase that the medieval theologians took as the legitimization, almost as the mandate for their theological work: "Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope" – an apologia for the "logos" of hope, meaning a transformation of the "logos," the reason for hope, into an apologia, an answer addressed to men. He was clearly convinced of the fact that faith is "logos," that it is a form of reason, a light issuing from the creating Light, and not a hodgepodge resulting from our own thought. This is why it is universal, and for this reason it can be communicated to all.
But this creating "Logos" is not a merely technical "logos." It is broader than this, it is a "logos" that is love, and therefore to be expressed in beauty and goodness. And in reality, for me art and the saints are the greatest apologia for our faith.
The arguments presented by reason are absolutely important and indispensable, but there always remains some disagreement somewhere. If, instead, we look at the saints, this great luminous arc that God has set across history, we see that here there is truly a power of goodness that lasts over the millennia, here there is truly light from light.
And in the same way, if we contemplate the created beauties of the faith, these simply are, I would say, the living proof of faith. Take this beautiful cathedral: it is a living proclamation! It speaks to us on its own, and beginning with the beauty of the cathedral we are able to proclaim in a visible way God, Christ and all of his mysteries: here these have taken shape, and are gazing back at us. All of the great works of art, the cathedrals – the Gothic cathedrals, and the splendid Baroque churches – all of them are a luminous sign of God, and therefore truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.
Christianity involves precisely this epiphany: that God has become a veiled Epiphany, he appears and shines. We have just listened to the sound of the organ in all its splendor, and I think that the great music born within the Church is an audible and perceptible rendering of the truth of our faith: from Gregorian chant to the music of the cathedrals to Palestrina and his era, to Bach and then to Mozart and Bruckner, and so on... Listening to all of these great works – the Passions by Bach, his Mass in B minor, and the great spiritual compositions of 16th century polyphony, of the Viennese school, of all of this music, even by minor composers – suddenly we feel: it is true! Wherever things like these are created, there is Truth.
Without an intuition capable of discovering the true creative center of the world, this beauty cannot be created. For this reason, I think that we must always act in such a way that these two things go together, we must present them together. When, in our own time, we discuss the reasonableness of the faith, we are discussing precisely the fact that reason does not end where experimental discoveries end, it does not end in positivism; the theory of evolution sees the truth, but sees only half of it: it does not see that behind this is the Spirit of creation. We are fighting for the expansion of reason, and therefore for a form of reason that, exactly to the point, is open to beauty as well, and does not have to leave it aside as something completely different and irrational.
Christian art is a rational form of art – we think of Gothic art, great music, or the Baroque art right here – but this is the artistic expression of a much broader form of reason, in which the heart and reason come together. This is the point. This, I think, is in some way the proof of the truth of Christianity: the heart and reason come together, beauty and truth touch. And to the extent that we are able to live in the beauty of truth, so much more will faith again be able to be creative, in our own time as well, and to express itself in a convincing artistic form.
Reason is useful to exactly the extent that the answers it renders are beautiful. Where they're ugly, it is false.
OUR PERFUNCTORY WORK HERE IS DONE!:
Sometimes, There’s News in the Gutter (CLARK HOYT, 8/12/08, NY Times)
Before Edwards’s admission, The Times never made a serious effort to investigate the story, even as the Enquirer wrote one sensational report after another: a 2:40 a.m. ambush by the tabloid’s reporters at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles after Edwards spent hours in a room with Hunter and her baby; an allegation of $15,000 a month in “hush money;” a grainy “spy photo” of him with a baby. [...]I do not think liberal bias had anything to do with it. But I think The Times — like The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, major networks and wire services — was far too squeamish about tackling the story. The Times did not want to regurgitate the Enquirer’s reporting without verifying it, which is responsible. But The Times did not try to verify it, beyond a few perfunctory efforts, which I think was wrong. Until the ABC report, only one mainstream news organization, McClatchy newspapers, seemed to be making headway with the story.
Not that it would have been easy. David Perel, the editor of the Enquirer, said, “This is a very hard story to prove, and I think that has frozen people in place.”
It is also the kind of story that The Times seems instinctively to recoil from, just as it ignored such stories in its own backyard as A-Rod and Madonna and Christie Brinkley’s ugly divorce, and played down the “love child” scandal involving New York City’s only Republican congressman, Vito Fossella, earlier this year. But Edwards was different. When the Enquirer first published its allegations, he was a major presidential candidate with a compelling personal story that included a wife of 30 years with incurable breast cancer.
As he told Katie Couric on “60 Minutes” early last year, “I think every single candidate for president, Republican and Democratic, have lives, personal lives, that indicate something about what kind of human being they are. And I think it is a fair evaluation ... to look at what kind of human beings each of us are.”
Still, Edwards-Hunter was “classically not a Times-like story,” said Craig Whitney, the standards editor.
Times editors said that when the first Enquirer story appeared and they could not verify it after fairly cursory inquiries, they left it alone.
The Times, "all the news that turns up even if we're cursory rather than serious"?
WHEN THE FACTS ARE A SMEAR YOU'RE IN DEEP CACA:
McCain Is Right to 'Go Negative' -- But Needs Positive (Mort Kondracke, 8/12/08, Real Clear Politics)
It has become standard among Democrats to accuse Republicans of "smearing" or "sliming" their candidates whenever the GOP goes negative."Willy Horton," "Swift Boat" and "Karl Rove" are shorthand for Democratic accusations, and the words alone are widely accepted as proof of GOP dirty tricks.
Republicans certainly did exploit 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis' furlough of convicted murderer Willie Horton, but it is a fact that Horton committed rape and assault after his release, reinforcing doubts about Dukakis' stance on crime.
In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did have a legitimate beef against Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who, as an anti-war veteran, once charged that atrocities were routinely committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam. [...]
In fact, of all the negative ads run in recent elections, the worst actually was run against Bush in 2000, in which the NAACP charged that the then-Texas governor's veto of a hate crimes bill was tantamount to condoning a racist murder. [...]
The fact is that Obama's fitness to be chief executive and commander in chief is probably the major question in the minds of swing voters -- and McCain has every right to reinforce their doubts.
Obama's youth, inexperience, judgment, values and consistency are all legitimate targets for Republicans, and, obviously, so are his policies.
Democrats, as witness the reactive ad from the Unicorn Rider whining that Maverick is a bigger celebrity, still don't get that it's not the attack that matters but its truth that kills you. Had John Kerry not been anti-Vietnam the Swift Boaters message wouldn't have mattered. But once you alerted voters that he'd opposed our government during war time he had to explain himself, not attack them.
Likewise, when Maverick reveals Senator Obama as an empty suit, a celebrity rather than a man of substantive achievement, the onus is on The One to tell people what he's done. We're waiting....
MORE:
Why Barack Obama is in Trouble (Steven Warshawsky, 8/11/08, Real Clear Politics)
What has Obama accomplished to date? In truth, not very much -- except to master the art of self-promotion.Obama has written two best-selling autobiographies: Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). Yet he has never served in an important leadership position in government, business, or the military. His ability to perform as a chief executive officer is completely untested.
Obama has prestigious degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, but no significant professional achievements to his name. No businesses or organizations he has founded or managed. No law firm partnerships. No important cases he has tried. Not a single work of legal scholarship he has authored, despite having been Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review and a part-time law professor at the University of Chicago for twelve years. (This is unheard of in the elite ranks of the legal profession, and calls into question the bona fides of Obama's professorship.)
Obama's principal occupation before entering politics was as a "community organizer" in Chicago. By his own admission, these efforts achieved only "some success," and none worthy of highlighting on his campaign website. Obama then served eight unexceptional years in the Illinois Senate, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, where he is not even considered one of the Democratic Party's legislative leaders.
And this man believes he is "the one we have been waiting for"?
Obama may be considered a "rock star" by his supporters, but the kind of superficial glamour and excitement that this terminology suggests is not what most voters are looking for in a president. Heartland values, not Hollywood values, still define what most voters want in a president. Most voters want a president whom they perceive as loyal, courageous, hardworking, and fair. Someone who commands the respect of others through the strength of his character and the wisdom of his actions. Someone who is prepared to fight to protect his home and country from invaders. In other words, someone who appeals to voters, on a psychological or emotional level, as the kind of person they would want for a father, husband, boss, or comrade-in-arms.
Rock stars may be fun, but they do not fit this image. Neither does Obama. His life story, while unique and interesting, bespeaks little more than an ambitious and opportunistic young man, still wet behind the ears, with an unhealthy fascination with his own ego - and potentially unreliable when the chips are down.
The American people are not going to entrust the security and prosperity of the country to such an immature and unproven man.
THE REVEREND WHO?:
The Obama/Wright/Kilpatrick Collision (Steve Mitchell, 8/12/08, Real Clear Politics)
Although [Detroit Mayor Kwame] Kilpatrick has distanced himself from Obama and Obama has distanced himself from Kilpatrick, they are both inextricably linked to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And, that is Obama's problem.The night before Wright imploded in front of the Washington press corps, he was the featured speaker at an NAACP dinner in Detroit where Mayor Kilpatrick gave him a rousing introduction, an introduction shown on local TV news shows. Undoubtedly, some 527 committee or the Michigan Republican Party has that introduction on DVD.
Rev. Wright has already proven to be an albatross around Obama's neck. Obama's support plummeted among white North Carolina General Election voters after TV ads linking him with Rev. Wright were aired during the North Carolina Democratic primary. That plunge in support did not go unnoticed by McCain supporters.
It is very likely that similar ads will be run in key battleground states starting in mid-October. In Michigan, you can bet that the much hated Kilpatrick will be included in the Obama/Wright ads, making them look like the Three Musketeers, "one for all and all for one."
The problem with running a Beltway smart/Kansas stupid campaign, as the Unicorn Rider has, is that you think an issue has been aired once everyone at the cocktail parties you go to has seen it on YouTube. But when the good Reverend crops up in ads this Fall it will be the first most people have heard about Senator Obama's black nationalist church affiliation.
THINK LIKE THE ELEPHANT PARTY:
Who Framed George Lakoff?: A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics (EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN, 8/15/08, The Chronicle Review)
In his new book, [George] Lakoff takes aim at "Enlightenment reason," the belief that reason is conscious, logical, and unemotional. Harnessing together work from several fields, particularly psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, he mounts a polemical assault on the notion that people think rationally — which, he argues, is fundamentally at odds with how the brain actually functions.Approximately 2 percent of the millions of pieces of information the brain absorbs every minute are processed consciously. The remaining 98 percent are handled by the unconscious brain. The mind, in other words, is like a tiny island of conscious reasoning afloat in a vast sea of automatic processes. In that sea, which Lakoff calls "the cognitive unconscious," most people's ideas about morality and politics are formed. We are all, in many respects, strangers to ourselves. Lakoff's book grandly describes what he believes are the revolutionary implications of his findings: "a new understanding of what it means to be a human being; of what morality is and where it comes from; of economics, religion, politics, and nature itself; and even of what science, philosophy, and mathematics really are." (He singles Chomsky out as "the ultimate figure of the Old Enlightenment.")
It is the political ramifications of Lakoff's theory that preoccupy him these days. An unabashed liberal (he insists on the label "progressive"), he says that Republicans have been quick to realize that the way people think calls for placing emotional and moral appeals at the center of campaign strategy. (He suspects that they gleaned their knowledge from marketing, where some of the most innovative work on the science of persuasion is taking place.) Democrats, Lakoff bemoans, have persisted in an old-fashioned assumption that facts, figures, and detailed policy prescriptions win elections. Small wonder that in recent years the cognitive linguist has emerged as one of the most prominent figures demanding that Democrats take heed of the cognitive sciences and abandon their faith in voters' capacity to reason.
The Brights sit around flogging their Enlightenment and wonder why Americans loathe them. But no matter who's trying to explain it to them they're going to cling to Reason and oppose the Stupid morality of their countrymen.
OF COURSE, THE PROBLEM WITH THIS STORY...:
New Documents: Barack Obama Misrepresented Support for Abortion-Infanticide (Steven Ertelt, 8/11/08, LifeNews.com)
When Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his opponent criticized him for supporting infanticide by voting against the Illinois version of the bill.Obama countered this charge by claiming that he had opposed the state bill because it lacked the neutrality clause found in the federal version.
As the Chicago Tribune reported on October 4, 2004, "Obama said that had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, even though he voted against a state version of the proposal."
During Obama's 2008 run for President, he has repeated those claims.
Now, documents obtained by the National Right to Life Committee show Obama's claim that he would have voted for the bill had it been Roe-neutral is a false argument.
According to the documents from the Illinois legislature, Obama, as the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting concerning neutrality language that was an exact duplicate of the clause in the federal bill.
During the March 2003 committee, Obama voted in support of adding the neutrality clause, but then led his colleagues on the panel in voting down the anti-infanticide bill on a 6-4 vote.
"Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion," NRLC legislative director Douglas Johnson told LifeNews.com.
Johnson said Obama did so "even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion."
...is that it just isn't believable that Mr. Obama led colleagues.
LET MY SHORTSTOP GO:
Commie Ball: A Journey to the End of a Revolution: Some of the greatest baseball players the world has never seen are in Cuba, where their talent is government property, and their only chance of turning pro is the risky boat ride to Florida. Gus Dominguez, an L.A. sports agent, has done more than anyone to help escaped players join major-league U.S. teams, but now he sits in a California jail, convicted of smuggling athletes. The author flies to Havana for an unprecedented scouting of the island’s stars as he reports on the twisted dynamics behind the Dominguez case. (Michael Lewis, July 2008, Vanity Fair)
Soon after he seized power, in January 1959, Fidel Castro banned professional sports from his island. The next year he tossed out the first pitch to open the Cuban amateur league and even took a few cuts with a bat. The ramrod-straight stance, plus the whiff of fourth-grade girl in the cock of his bat, should have dispelled the rumor that the Maximum Leader had once been a pro prospect, but the myth survived this brush with reality. (“Total bullshit,” says Ralph Avila, who is in charge of scouting in the Dominican Republic for the Los Angeles Dodgers and played ball in Havana during what was meant to have been Fidel’s prime. “Fidel never played any sport at university. He didn’t have time. In Havana there was a pitcher named Felix Castro. Fidel used his name to say that he played baseball.”)For the next 30 years no Cuban ballplayer left. Then, on July 10, 1991, the Cuban national team, returning from a tournament, spent the night in the Miami airport hotel. A pitcher named René Arocha walked out of his room, found his way to his aunt’s Miami apartment, and never returned. From that moment, until the end of the 1990s, the most common route out of Cuba for a baseball player was to make the national team and then, when the team was abroad, walk away. Sneak out of the hotel late at night and run to the nearest blood relative you had in Miami.
The funny thing was, at least in the beginning, they had no idea of their market value. René Arocha, for one, never imagined he could play in the big leagues. “I didn’t leave Cuba because I wanted a baseball career,” Arocha says. “I didn’t think I was at the same level as the big-leaguers. I thought the quality of the major leagues was light-years ahead of me.” But then he got a call from a Cuban-American named Gus Dominguez, who explained how thrilled he was “that someone finally told Fidel to go and shove it,” and that “you are better than you know.” At the time, Dominguez still worked at his graphic-design firm, in Los Angeles, but happened to be in Miami on business. They arranged to meet. “If Gus hadn’t called, I don’t think I’d even have tried to play baseball,” recalls Arocha. “He took me to a big-league game. That’s when it dawned on me, Jesus, I think I can play with these guys.”
Arocha flew with Dominguez to California, where Dominguez planned to introduce him to Jose Canseco’s agent, whom Dominguez knew slightly. (Canseco, the famed Oakland Athletics slugger, came to this country from Cuba as an infant with his family.) The morning of the meeting, Canseco’s agent called and canceled. Dominguez had taken the call and tried to put a happy face on things, but Arocha demanded to know exactly what this big-time American agent had said: “We have someone more important to meet with.”
“O.K.,” Arocha recalls saying. “I’m not important to them. They’re not important to me. You be my agent.”
“I have no idea how to do it,” said Dominguez.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Arocha. “We’ll figure it out together. You’re the only one who has helped me so far.”
A year later René Arocha went 11–8 for the St. Louis Cardinals and found himself in the running for Rookie of the Year. “After a while,” says Arocha, “I’d look at all the players on the field and think, I have a friend back in Cuba who is as good or better than everyone who is here.”
That’s how Gus Dominguez had become a sports agent. He took an interest in these Cubans when no one else did, and so he became, by default, their guy. The players in Cuba learned of Arocha’s success—and saw the Cuban government’s decision not to punish his family—and thought, If he can do it, I can, too. In 1993, two years after Arocha defected, the Cuban national “B” team flew to Buffalo, New York, for the World University Games. Eddie Oropesa, a 21-year-old pitcher on his first trip abroad, sneaked out of the college dorm in which he was housed, but couldn’t find the cousin who was supposed to be waiting. Terrified, he wound up wandering around some graveyard in the dark. He ran back to his room and stared at the ceiling. The next morning, as the team warmed up, Oropesa handed his spikes to his good friend shortstop Rey Ordoñez, then dashed for the fence behind home plate. It was at least 12 feet high, but he went up and over in his stocking feet. “I didn’t know where my cousin was,” Oropesa recalls. “I just started climbing the fence. I heard Rey shouting, ‘Oropesa! Oropesa! Oropesa’s gone crazy!’ But I didn’t look back. When I hit the ground I just started running.” Newly liberated, he heard Gus Dominguez was the man to see. “I wanted to leave not because I thought I could play baseball,” says Oropesa, “but because I didn’t want my son to go through the experience that I had. And the only way for him to get out was for me to get out first.” (Dominguez helped Oropesa extract his wife and son from Cuba three years later.) [...]
ike everyone else in Cuba, baseball players earn far less than a human being can survive on. And like every other Cuban, to cover the difference between what they need to live on and what they are paid by their government jobs, the players turn to the black market. Playing baseball is just the loss leader that gets them into their actual trade: retailer of stolen baseball merchandise. Before he fled on a boat and into the arms of Gus Dominguez, for instance, Industriales pitcher Yoankis Turino pilfered baseballs, forged the autographs of his teammates on them, and flogged them to tourists for $5 a pop. A player’s labor may belong to the state, but his jersey, at the end of the season, is his to keep: after the two seasons he played with Industriales, Osbek Castillo sold his for $30. The jersey of a lesser player on a bad team might fetch as little as $5, but that of a big star might sell for $50. The jersey for a national-team member is worth twice the jersey of a Cuban Series team, and a jersey sold outside of Cuba goes for multiples of a jersey inside Cuba. In the last World Cup, a pitcher with a 95-m.p.h. fastball, named Pedro Luis Lazo, was caught by a Cuban-government official in the lobby of his Taipei hotel selling his uniform to a Taiwanese businessman for $217.
All this goes on with the more or less full knowledge of the authorities, who use that knowledge to instill fear in the players. The 2006 Cuban batting title was won by a 27-year-old named Michel Enríquez. This year he’s not on any roster, and word is that he’s been suspended. No one knows why—no one ever knows why. But it’s a fair bet that he got caught selling something on the open market that he shouldn’t have—probably his baseball talent.
At any rate, the ruling idea in Cuban baseball is that the players are not only amateurs but interchangeable. Stars are unimportant; team is everything. But there’s nothing like a baseball field to remind you that all men are not created equal.
Prosecuting Mr. Dominguez was the crime.
ONLY TAXES CAN KEEP GAS PRICES AS HIGH AS WE NEED THEM:
The Tax That Saved the Planet: Sure, we can keep trying to reduce carbon emissions through the Kyoto Protocol and other schemes. Or we can do the smart thing. (Stephen Probyn, April 23, 2007, Vanity Fair)
The Greg Mankiw in 2006, and although its original purpose was not to fight global warming, this group of academics and policy wonks has advanced an idea that might just be the weapon we need. Atop a rising tide of other experts, Pigovians will tell you that carbon taxes, not the Kyoto Protocol or any other regulatory scheme, are what we need to deal with the climate-change crisis and a host of other global ills.The simple solution, they say, is to raise the cost of emitting carbon to the point where each of us voluntarily cuts our energy consumption and reduces carbon emissions. What's the best way to do that? Not a regulatory emissions-trading scheme, such as Kyoto, which is at once weak and unwieldy. Not a worldwide regime of rationing, which is politically unthinkable. Rather, the Pigovians say, we can change behavior by changing the price signals that people receive. This is done by simply raising taxes on commodities we don't like to the point where consumers reduce consumption.
So-called Pigovian taxes don't really work when it comes to "sin taxes" on alcohol and cigarettes; that's because these commodities are pretty well the end products in themselves—if you want an alcohol buzz or a nicotine rush, there isn't much alternative. But fossil fuels are different. Nobody wants fossil fuels for themselves; what they want is transportation or heating or television. Pigovian taxes can work as greenhouse-gas policy because they induce us both to curb our consumption and, in the longer term, to introduce new technologies.
Sin taxes have worked rather well on reducing smoking rates too.
THE DANGER OF ANALYZING A CAMPAIGN IN A VACUUM:
The story of O (Muhammad Cohen, 8/12/08, Asia Times)
Turning the spotlight on Obama shouldn't be successful only for the Republicans. Rather than complain as Obama has about the glare shining brightly on him, the Democratic contender and his party should welcome the nourishing light of public exposure and convert it into energy and voters. They should embrace the focus on Obama as a chance to put out their messages about why the Democrats are different from a president with approval ratings in the 20% range and the Republican candidates bearing Bush's stain.It's odd for Obama to be griping that the vote has become a referendum on him; that's one vote that any politician ought welcome and be confident about winning. Moreover, Obama gets a free shot to tell voters who he is, highlight his unique version of the American dream, and lay out his policies to reverse and repair the damage of the past eight years.
If Obama can't or won't do, there's another Democrat available who is quite comfortable when things are all about her. In fact, she rarely encounters any situation that's not all about her and her illustrious family. Hillary Clinton would relish the chance to face McCain, or anyone else, in a referendum about her. While Obama lounges on the beach in Hawaii this week, perhaps Hillary Clinton diehards are reminding Democratic super delegates that she's tanned, rested and ready, if still supremely unrealistic about her chances.
Gordon Brown has pretty nearly rendered Labour obsolete by explaining how they're different from the Thatcherism of Tony Blair. Obama would do the same thing for the Democrats if he differentiated them from W, which is why he's silent about his voting record and previously expressed views. The mystery is why he doesn't (and Gore and Kerry didn't) run as a Clintonite and why it took Hillary so long to do so. Once she did she staged the comeback that extended the primary season a month or two longer than anyone thought it was lasting.
YOU CAN ONLY DELAY DEVOLUTION, NOT STOP IT:
Will Russia Get Away With It?: We owe Georgia, which has stood with US soldiers in Iraq, a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. (William Kristol, 8/11/08, Der Spiegel)
Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”But Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.
For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine’s. Shouldn’t we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?
Incidentally, has Russia really been helping much on Iran? It has gone along with — while delaying — three United Nations Security Council resolutions that have imposed mild sanctions on Iran. But it has also supplied material for Iran’s nuclear program, and is now selling Iran antiaircraft systems to protect military and nuclear installations.
It’s striking that dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes — whatever their differences — seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies. So Russia helps Iran. Iran and North Korea help Syria. Russia and China block Security Council sanctions against Zimbabwe. China props up the regimes in Burma and North Korea.
When Frozen Wars Heat Up: Russia vs. Georgia (James S. Robbins, 8/11/08, National Review)
In retrospect the conflict is not entirely surprising; the last few months have seen a number of violent incidents in the separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — shellings, bombings, kidnappings, shootings, and so forth. The frozen war was clearly defrosting.Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s attempt to take back South Ossetia by force was certainly ill-timed and unwise. Perhaps he thought the inexperienced Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is nominally in charge of Russia’s defense policy, would be too indecisive to act. Or that the more capable Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who actually runs the country, would be too distracted by the opening ceremonies of the Olympics to take concerted action. Whatever Saakashvili was thinking, his offensive was a rash act, and the Russians demonstrated not only their willingness to intervene but their capability to drub the relatively small Georgian armed forces in a conventional fight. The lesson for Georgia is that they would not fare well against a full scale Russian invasion, though that does not appear to be Russia’s intention at this time.
Russia’s hypocrisy in supporting the cause of the Ossetians is stunning. During the conflict in Chechnya there was no question that the separatists would be annihilated, not given independence or a special status inside Russia. In the Kosovo war, Russia was a stalwart defender of principle of Serbian sovereignty against Kosovar self-determination. But when it comes to Georgia, Russia is suddenly the champion of “oppressed peoples.”
While we need to defend Georgia from the Russians on principle, Ossetia and Chechnya eventually get to self-determine.
MORE:
Do the Right Thing: Nothing peachy about the Russian attack on Georgia. (Jonathan Foreman, 8/11/08, National Review)
As the U.S. figures out what to do about the Russia-Georgian war, it should bear in mind that the world is watching very closely. Georgia has proved itself as a true friend and ally of the United States; it has sent thousands of troops from its small army to help the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.Sure the Georgians got themselves into this conflict by launching a bid to recapture South Ossetia. But it wasn’t unprovoked — the Russians have been building up the government and armed forces of the breakaway province for years, and have been applying every kind of pressure to stop Georgia joining NATO, including aggressive measures like shooting down a Georgian aircraft earlier this year. And the Russians are in no position to criticize Georgia’s efforts to recapture breakaway territory given the tens of thousands the Russians killed to reverse Chechnya’s attempts to break free.
As Russian bombs rain down on key Georgian military bases, Ukraine and the Baltic states know all too well that they are next on the list for Russian invasion — probably with the same pretext of protecting Russian citizens — if the Kremlin gets away with crushing Georgia.
Also watching what happens in the Caucasus with one eye on the U.S. will be allied countries like Taiwan (it knows that U.S. corporations have long been pushing successive U.S. administrations to abandon Taiwanese democracy), Pakistan (it’s been dumped before), India, Turkey, the Gulf states, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, Australia, and Colombia… the list goes on.