Update on last Sunday's "attack" on Georgian and Polish presidents

Remember the attack on the motorcade of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili who was visiting the border with South Ossetia with his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski last Sunday? The Georgian public relation machine immediately blamed the Russians, with "unconfirmed reports" claiming South Ossetians border guard had been seen shooting near the motorcade.

Well, here's an update. The Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) came to the conclusion that the incident was more than likely staged by the Georgians:

The daily “Dziennik” cites an Internal Security Agency (ABW) report saying that the shooting incident in Georgia involving Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Georgian President Saakashvili was most likely staged by the Georgians.

According to the daily, ABW head Krzysztof Bondaryk sent the report to the top sixteen people in Poland. The report states the shots fired near the presidential motorcade were most likely fired by Georgians as a provocation and propaganda tool.

If confirmed, add this to the long list of reasons why Georgia should never be given NATO membership. Saakashvili has proved to be dangerous and manipulative; if given membership he could cause real trouble by attempting to force confrontation with Russia. This would be disastrous because NATO members could be forced to side with Georgia against Russia. Let's not get sucked into a mutual defense pact with this madman.

Georgians are trying hard to portray themselves as the poor victim of evil Russia, even though they started the conflict this summer. The MSM in the U. S. is largely buying this narrative, and my instinct tells me that this report will not change this situation; in fact I'm fairly sure it will be largely ignored by the MSM.

Hat tip: Paul Wells

Today in the World: Georgia

According to the BBC, shots were fired near the Georgian leader today.

Georgian President Mikhail Sakaashvili was showing his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski the border between Georgia and the "sort of independent" republic of South Ossetia. The shot was heard when the motorcade came within 30m of the border. According to a witness, it was a South Ossetian border guard who fired warning shots.

It is likely that the shots were not aimed at the Sakaashvili, it would have been a total public relation disaster for Russia to accidentally kill Kaczynski. But it is even more likely that the shots were approved by someone high up in the Russian government. Russia might be aggressive but they are not crazy; the last thing they want is some border soldier in the Caucasus starting troubles they did not want. In all likelihood this was a message to Sakaashvili: "If you want to make trouble you better watch your back, and you better not come close to South Ossetia again."

Mark Ames on Russia

Interesting interview of Mark Ames, the author of an article on the American media framing of the Russian-Georgian conflict in The Nation, on the subject of the Russian-Georgian conflict, Russia-American relations and topics in Russia's sphere.

I talked about the conflict previously, pointing to a NY Times article which showed that the way the media framed the conflict was totally wrong. But as Ames said, the NY Times was one of the worst offender on pro Georgia bias during the conflict. There is a strong lobby in the United States that wishes to portray Russia as irrational, dangerous and a threat to world stability; they are trying, and largely succeeding, to impose their narrative on the mainstream of American politics. This is dangerous because they tell only one side of the story, they totally misunderstand Russia internal politics and they ignore or don't understand long term demographic trends which will limit Russia to being only a regional power. As Ames says in the interview, Russians are extremely sensitive to how the west see them and very angry when they think they are being treated unfairly. So the narrative could become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the west treat Russia as if they were the "bad guys", they will start acting like it out of a lack of confidence in the west.

Here's an analogy. In psychiatry there is a defense mechanism called projective identification, which is often unconsciously used by people with borderline personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder. It is a mechanism whereas person A project an emotion on person B and will unconsciously act to make person B feel and act that way to confirm his own mistaken belief. Here is an example. If a patient is angry because his doctor is going on a vacation and he feels abandoned (that would be typical of a borderline personality disorder who are also prone to attempt suicide), he will project his anger to the doctor; he does not recognize that he is angry, he believes that it's the doctor who is angry. Then he will say, upon leaving the office, "See you after your vacations doc... if I don't kill myself". The goal is to make the doctor angry to confirm his own pathological belief. This allows the patient to avoid taking a look at himself, he can blame others instead.

This is a similar kind of behavior we are seeing in regard to USA relation with Russia. If you look at it from Russia's point of view, its relationship with the USA has been far from positive since Yelstin such as the disastrous western backed privatization, NATO expansion after promising not to do it, messing with Serbia and Kosovo without Russian support, support of Putin enemies in former Soviet Union Republics, some of whom have been in the Russian Empire for 4 centuries and Bush backing off the ABM treaty among many others humiliations. Yet the Russian point of view is never mentioned in the mainstream media, all we hear about is a totalitarian and irrational dictator bent on destroying its neighbours. Let's stop the projective identification. Go listen to Ames.

Sarko back offs on Missile Defense

Arthur Goldhammer reports that Sarkozy has backed off on his previous statement that the US should abandon its Missile Defense project in Eastern Europe. Last Friday I called Sarkozy's move shrewd. So what now? Why did he back off?

Arthur (link above) thinks that Sarkozy weaken his hands by backing off and make Russians more suspicious; and he wonders whether his new position means that he learned in Washington this weekend that Obama had no intention of removing his support for the project.

I do think it might be possible that Obama's representative to the G20 meeting, Madeleine Albright who is well known for her Russophobia, might have scared Sarkozy into believing that Obama would not back off. But after thinking about the issue, I think I stick with my original assessment. I don't think Sarkozy weakened his hand by backing off. He signaled to Russia that he was opposed to the plan and to Washington that he would support them if they decided to not go ahead with the project and his retraction shows that he would not object if they went ahead either. By retracting his previous statement, he takes a back seat and does not involve France further; he saw that loudly opposing USA foreign policy did not get Chirac very far in terms of results. The ambivalence of his position is its strength, everyone can read into it what they want but no one can be seriously angry with his position.

I still think the new US administration will eventually back off the Missile Defense plan in Obama's first term, but maybe the Russophobes will win. We'll see.

Sarkozy calls Obama to back off US missile shield...

The remark is interesting because a prominent European leader said out loud what everyone believed but did not dare say: the missile shield is useless (in its current conception) and the Europeans don't really want it. The reason why he probably chose to announce this now is shrewd and shows he can see which way the wind is blowing. While it was obvious that Bush would not take the hint that the project was useless and a remark would have only highlighted the powerlessness of whoever said it; Sarkozy is betting that Obama will eventually back off on this project and he is probably right in that regard. The logic that the missile defense is not aimed at Russia but at some "rogue" state, while being deployed around Russia, did not convince anyone; it is mostly seen as a response to Russia's "aggressive" behavior. A back off on this project is probably the first thing that an Obama administration will be ready to give when they talk with Russian leaders, because it is more of a symbolic move than anything, given its overall uselessness, and Obama has stated during the campaign that he plans to cut investment for "unproven" missile defense systems so he could convincingly sell this move on the domestic front as something he had planned all along.

In the end, Russia will remember Sarkozy as the first one who spoke out against the missile defense system and domestic opinion will remember that he, contrary to Blair, could influence American Presidents. That is probably what he's banking on. Shrewd move.

Hat tip: Cernig at Newshoggers

The UN, always there when you need your daily dose of irony

Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Islamic kingdom that forbids the public practice of other religious faiths, will preside Wednesday over a two-day U.N. conference on religious tolerance -Washington Post

Maybe next week Russia could preside a conference on how to lead the world to a post-nationalism stage.

Via FP Passport.

Lawrence Summers?

Since I am too young to have followed politics closely in the 1990s, all I knew about Lawrence Summers was the 2005 controversy over his comments on women which made him resign from his job as Harvard's president. I still think he has been unfairly criticized for his comments on why certain jobs are disproportionately occupied by men. I think his arguments are sound hypotheses, I've defended them several times and I managed to convince everyone I talked to that they made sense; but I'll readily admit that they're easy to misinterpret (and making them probably showed poor judgment given his political aspirations).

But I have a hard time defending this:

The aside was leaked to the press and stated that, developed countries ought to export more pollution to developing countries because these countries would incur the lowest cost from the pollution in terms of lost wages of people made ill or killed by the pollution due to the fact that wages are so low in developing countries. The aside went on to state that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

There's a time when an economist should realize when what might be economically optimal doesn't make sense from a moral perspective. He failed that test.

He was chief economist of the World Bank from 1991-1993. Given the disastrous results of his policies in the region, and his support of the disastrous World Bank policies of the 1990s, I have a hard time taking this man seriously. Maybe he learned from his mistakes and maybe he is the best economist for the job now, I do not know since this isn't my field. I do like his opinion that increasing wage discrepancy is a problem, but I am troubled by his "successes" and his judgment.

Here's a view on the result of his policies in Eastern Europe and Russia:

He turned to America’s great rival, the former Soviet Union, to try out his economic experiments. In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country’s economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers’s first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania’s suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania’s economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so–even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the World Bank, where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let’s-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his Harvard protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic “rescue” of Russia’s crisis-ridden economy. It’s a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, Russia’s GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer helped create had collapsed in what was then the world’s biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladmir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and anything associated with Western liberalism. -Mark Ames

The truth about "Russian aggression"

From the NYTimes:

Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

In other words, Georgia attacked the enclave of South Otessia, killing russians "peacekeeper" in the process, which drew a Russian response. The dominant narrative, coming straight out of Tbilisi, was that Georgia was attempting to defend itself from a resurgent Russia. This was eaten up by the American establishment especially John McCain and the neoconservatives.

More broadly, this crisis serve this illustrate the pitfalls of using simplified caricatures of your enemies and look only for the data that fits it. The Russian government might not be always honest, but it doesn't mean everything coming out of the Kremlin is a lie. And it's not because Saakashvili claims to be pro-Western that he's telling the truth.

This crisis is also another reason why you should read Daniel Larison regularly.