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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 17, 2008
Georgia on our plate
It is years since I hauled out my favourite Josef Stalin quote. Time to carry it up from the basement, dust it off, and put it back on display. “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.”That the quote may be apocryphal, does not disturb me. So many of the best quotes are apocryphal, and only a puritan could wish to eliminate them from the quotation books on that account alone. One need only put the asterisk on it, the way the artist’s colourmen do on rose madder, or the Homeric scholars on passages where they suspect interpolation. But why do I quote it, apparently with approval? It is not from any fondness for the late Soviet tyrant and mass-murderer, let me assure the gentle reader. Nor should he assume, as some readers in the past, that I favour the casual and reckless use of weapons of mass destruction. For as a more careful meditation upon that quote will establish, not even “Stalin” was that crazy. The point is that nuclear weapons, and everything else in that genre, have the power to scare people. And once they are frightened, they will do stupid things. It is important therefore to keep one’s nerve; and the paradox in quoting Stalin to make the point, is that one must keep one’s nerve especially in facing down tyrants like him. The invasion of the sovereign territory of Georgia, last week, was for all the people who were killed and the physical damage done, nevertheless more a gesture than a war. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s current strongman -- a kind of “Stalin lite,” or “Ivan-the-not-so-Terrible” -- was attempting to achieve several strategic ends by the simple device of terrifying the people who might stand in his way. In the event, as is now clear, he wanted the smaller oil-bearing republics around Russia’s southern periphery to understand that they are entirely at his mercy, and will flourish only insofar as they serve Russian interests. He wanted the other little republics, such as the Baltic and other small pro-Western states between Russia and Western Europe, to know that the Russian bear is off its tether again, and that they’ll be wise to feed it. He wanted the larger states of Western Europe -- Germany and France especially -- to understand how desperately their economies depend on the smooth supply of Russian oil and gas; while driving up the price of these commodities. And he had a score to settle over the foolish, Clintonian NATO exercise that ended in the detachment of Muslim Kosovo from Orthodox, Russian-allied Serbia. On this last point, I must say: the West was already paying for that act of idiocy, through the European terror networks now adapting Kosovo for use as their safe haven. But as I’ve been arguing since 1999, it was equally moronic to antagonize Russia pointlessly, while breaking our own rules to dismember a sovereign state. Among other things, the sight of that act of Western hypocrisy played mightily into the hands of Putin, and guaranteed him Russian domestic support. But having conceded that, nothing remains to concede. Moreover, Kosovo was at least a multilateral folly, in which almost all the states of Western Europe freely joined in a collective loss of judgement, after an earnestly effete essay in diplomacy. Compare: the Russian dismemberment of Georgia is the entirely arbitrary decision of a single unaccountable state, under the direction of a single evil man. The question for Sunday is a moral as well as strategic one. Are we going to stand for this? And if we’re not, what are we going to do about it? It would, I should think quite obviously, not be prudent to send military forces to Georgia’s aid, and thus invite a direct military confrontation. And I mean by this, not morally prudent, for the consequences of such an act would most likely bring an evil far out of proportion to the good it would serve. No one in his right mind can want a war with Russia in the foreseeable future, even one we would ultimately win. My view is that the Bush administration has done and is doing the limit of what is wise, in promising the direct delivery of reconstruction aid to Georgia. And, the most we can hope from Europe, is the refusal to take Ukraine and Georgia off the list of applicants for membership in NATO. Beyond this, we must engage in a new battle of wills, in a revived Cold War -- started, like the original, by Russian acts of aggression and intransigence. Putin has generously removed all reasonable doubt about the kind of leadership he offers the “New Russia.” It will be aggressive and intransigent, like the old, and spoiling for another massive historical disaster. (Recall: we went two rounds with Germany.) Our task is again to isolate the beast, study ways to free ourselves from any kind of dependence upon its whims, and re-strengthen and extend the NATO alliance as our shield against any further vagaries of the big ex-Soviet thug.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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