Yesterday I said that it would interesting to see how the west will handle the war in South Ossetia, as after the support for the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, countries like the US, UK or Germany could hardly oppose the Ossentians doing the same, or could they? Well, Bush’s big speech on the subject seems to confirm that
the west has firmly chosen the Georgian side in the conflict and consistency of principle be damned.
The conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia (not to mention Abkhazia, the other breakaway region) and Russia is complex and should not be reduced to some black and white schematic pitting good Georgians vs bad Russians, but that seems to be the spin being decided upon it by western media. So yesterday we had the CIA connected Jamestown Foundation talking about “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia“, ignoring that this time it was Georgia that unnecesarrily escalated the conflict. At the Guardian’s Comment is Free, it was Svante Cornell who got the opportunity to say it was all Russia’s fault while at Crooked Timber, as always a reliable weathervane for the sensible transatlantic academic/liberal blogosphere, it was Maria Farrell who did the same.
It reminds me of what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia, when it was decided quite soon in that it was the Serbs that were the baddies, while the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were jugded to be the victims of Serbian aggression, ignoring the much more complicated reality of Croatian and Bosnian warcrimes in favour of a clean narrative. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has attempted to create a same of narrative for this conflict, presenting his country as the victim and himself as the democratic defender of a modern, western state, when he has been behaving in the same autocratic manner as a Putin, frex having the riot police fire on demonstrators. The fact that he speaks English seems to help an awful lot.