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The Georgian mess allows John Podhoretz to continue his theme of the end of the vacation from history.
Quick show of hands: Who among us expected that, in the course of the convention acceptance speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama and throughout the three debates in which they face each other in the fall, the words “South Ossetia” might be mentioned again and again? Or that the nation of Georgia might loom larger over the November election than the state of Georgia?
This is the thing about presidential elections — they can turn on a dime. This one has already. The success of the surge is playing a complex role in the calculations of both camps, with the possibility of a clear victory in sight in Iraq before anyone actually casts a vote in November. For a time, it appeared the surge victory might, in an odd and unexpected way, help Barack Obama by taking Iraq off the table as a source of anxiety and allowing him to focus the election more specifically on the economy. But Obama’s own uncertainty about how to address the surge suggests otherwise. …
National Review editors on Russia’s invasion of Georgia.
… A massive Russian response, quite manifestly ready to go, was launched. Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia. Another pro-Russian force attacked Georgia in that part of the second breakaway province of Abkhazia that Tbilisi still controls. Georgia’s well-trained but modest army was forced to withdraw. Russian planes continued to bomb central Georgia, seeking to degrade both military and economic targets. When Saakashvili proposed a cease-fire, the Russians at first refused to talk to him, then started multiplying conditions for their acceptance; those conditions now include Saakashvili’s resignation.
Throughout this calculated aggression, the Russian media has played an inglorious but technically brilliant role. They have used the most modern techniques of journalism and marketing to broadcast the worst lies of the Kremlin. Those lies themselves have been cleverly designed to imitate the West’s own justifications for the Kosovo intervention: “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Doubtless the Georgian forces committed crimes in their incursion into South Ossetia. There are plausible reports that they shelled villages. But they were overwhelmed so quickly that they simply could not have committed crimes of the scale alleged by the Kremlin. Besides, Russia’s long patronage of South Ossetian attacks, its invasion across internationally recognized borders, and its relentless bombing of a country that has retreated and offered a cease-fire deprives it of any right to make such accusations. Russian policy is a war crime in itself.
None of this is or should be about Russia or the Russian people. All of it stinks of Soviet propaganda, Soviet brutality, Soviet morality, and Soviet nostalgia. It is the handiwork of the siloviki clique that currently monopolizes power in Russia through authoritarian politics, kleptocratic economics, and media manipulation. This clique must be shown that war crimes do not pay. The Russian people, too, need to learn that nostalgia for Soviet imperialism is a dead end for Russia. …
Corner posts on the subject.
… We are limited in how we can help our Georgian ally, but Putin’s brazen attack on Georgia should be a warning to the United States and our allies on Russia’s border and elsewhere in the area that they need to be prepared for more of this.
George Will is brilliant.
Asked in 1957 what would determine his government’s course, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s new prime minister, replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Now, into America’s trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded — a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again. …
… What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990. (The August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev)
This year’s August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world’s preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film “Triumph of the Will,” has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.
A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.
As for Iraq, Chris Hitchens wonders why it’s so hard for some people to accept and celebrate good news.
One day I will publish my entire collection of upside-down Iraq headlines, where the true purport of the story is the inverse of the intended one. (Top billing thus far would go to the greatest downer of them all: the tale of Iraq’s unemployed gravediggers, their always-insecure standard of living newly imperiled by the falling murder rate. You don’t believe me? Wait for the forthcoming anthology.) While you wait, you might consider last week’s astonishing report about the Iraqi budget surplus and the way in which the report was reported. …
… It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist “insurgents” as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.
Had any of this sinister nonsense been heeded, it wouldn’t even be Saddam’s goons who were getting their hands on that fantastic wealth in such a strategic country. It would have been the gruesome militias who answer either to fanatical Wahhabism on one wing or to fanatical Shiism on another, and who are the instruments of tyrannical forces in neighboring countries. Hardly a prospect to be viewed with indifference. I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight. …
The Politico points out seven worrisome items for Barack.
A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge.
Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls – with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters, according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics – while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide.
“It’s not that people think McCain will win – it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. …
Thomas Sowell thinks there is little substance to Obama.
Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation.
Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures.
Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance.
Senator Barack Obama’s campaign this year reminds me very much of that course from Professor Galbraith. Many people were ecstatic during the early primaries, as each state’s voters heard his glittering generalities for the first time.
The media loved the novelty of a black candidate with a real chance to become president, and his left-wing vision of the world was largely their vision as well. There was a veritable media honeymoon for Obama. …
Debra Saunders has Edwards thoughts.
… The pretty-boy candidate always was the biggest phony at any Democratic debate. He was the $400-haircut poster boy for poverty. The 28,000-square-foot mansion owner, who preached about global warming. The candidate who demanded that other Democrats swear off accepting contributions from Fox News baron Rupert Murdoch, after he pocketed a $500,000 advance – with an extra $300,000 for expenses – from Murdoch’s Harper Collins. The man who ran as the doting husband of the cancer-battling Elizabeth Edwards while he was boffing an overpaid campaign aide.
If I were a Democrat, I would be spittin’ mad. If Edwards had won his party’s nomination for president, news of the affair most surely would have gotten out and the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the White House would have evaporated instantly, as would-be supporters would have realized they can’t believe a word the man says.
Edwards had asserted that National Enquirer reports of an affair with Rielle Hunter were “completely untrue.” In admitting to the affair – but not the lovechild, if you care to believe him – Edwards explained in a statement, that he relied on inaccuracies in the story to deny it, “But being 99 percent honest is no longer enough.”
99 percent honest? Even when he is coming clean, he’s a snake. …
David Harsanyi says, when it comes to politicians, low expectations would be our wisest course.
… Incredibly, despite our low opinion of elected officials and countless examples, this election season millions of otherwise reasonable Americans will once again dutifully plaster their cars with bumper stickers or plant yard signs bearing the name of some lifelong bureaucrat who has promised them the world.
Are these men and women running for office so special that they deserve near-religious adoration?
Is government so important in your life that you offer it?
Politicians exist to implement public policy. They lean left or they lean right.
Do they possess an extraordinary ability to magically “fix” the economy, or “create” jobs or change the world? Hardly.
Let’s keep expectations for politicians where they belong: Stay out of jail. Everything else is gravy.
What’s it like to challenge the globalony greens in England? The documentarian Martin Durkin has some answers.
… In the year that has passed since the film was broadcast, I have discovered what that “chilling effect” is. It is when a programme maker needs to risk his career in order to make a particular film. It is when a commissioning editor or a broadcaster is genuinely fearful of straying into certain areas.
The main Ofcom complainant noted: “This is Not an Attack on Free Speech”. So rather than try to shut me up, bully and vilify, why don’t they engage in an honest discussion about the science?
I’ll tell you why. Because the theory of global warming is crumbling round their ears. For the past decade now, world temperatures have been static or slightly declining – and that’s according to the IPCC. I don’t remember their silly models predicting that 10 years ago.
I no longer give a stuff whether left-liberal types agree with my views on global warming. However, I do expect every last one of them who claims to value the freedom to speak one’s mind, to defend my right to air them.