Posted: 26 Aug 2008 12:10 PM CDT
Michael Totten fell for it. After asserting Georgia didn’t start nuthin’ because those mean South Ossetians were busy attacking those sweet innocent Georgians while those scary mean Russians were already advancing on the Georgian capital, Totten lets us know where he’s getting his information:
Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is friendly as democratic as Georgia’s. I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms’ briefing to me and signed off on it as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.Oh God. He forgot “adventurer” and egomaniac. Well, let’s do this.
Yes, no one outside the region know much about it, save Christian missionaries who spoke at length of Azeri atrocities, and Kids in the Hall skits about how Armenians and Azeria hate each other.
A Two-Sided Descent Into Full-Scale War: Anyway, he goes on at length quoting this paid representative of Georgia, who manages to portray Georgia as a reactionary victim of Russian power politics. That is certainly true, to an extent, as this excellent look at the complicated start of the war shows (Matthew Bryza, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Region, surprisingly strongly decries Georgian attacks on civilian targets—the action that formed Russia’s casus belli to invade the rest of Georgia, though to Bryza’s credit, he also lambasts the Russians or not ratcheting down tensions beforehand).
But then Totten admits he had no idea there were skirmishes between Georgian and South Ossetian forces in the days leading up to the conflict—something that was obvious in the regular news coming from the region, but was curiously lacking from most people’s discussions of the conflict.
Critically missing from this paid flack’s explanation of the war’s origins is Saakashvili’s brinksmanship. Under Shevardnadze (who also seems disappointed with Saakashvili’s recklessness), Georgia had never pompously strutted itself along the border of its far larger and more powerful northern neighbor, blithely assuming the U.S. and Europe would help it out in any conflict that arose. Saakashvili was, in a word, reckless in assuming he could make a lightning strike into South Ossetia and cut off the Roki tunnel right when everyone knew Russia had already massed on the border. Yes, Russia played a role in provoking the conflict, but Saakashvili was just stupid in playing into it.
Remarkably, Totten operates under the assumption that hearing a long presentation by a paid representative of Georgia, along with an escorted tour of a Georgian hospital with Georgian soldiers will tell him anything about the conflict. He doesn’t understand that Georgia’s spy drone which was shot down by a Russian plane was violating the terms of the cease-fire agreement in Abkhazia, nor does he seem to get that more South Ossetians died during the pre-war skirmish than Georgians. But what was this about?
“On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage focused on Georgian villages, not on Georgian positions. Remember, these Georgian villages inside South Ossetia – the Georgians have mostly evacuated those villages, and three of them are completely pulverized. That evening, the 7th, the president gets information that a large Russian column is on the move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the Roki tunnel [into Georgia from Russia]. Then a little bit later, somebody else sees them. That’s three confirmations. It was time to act.
That does not match with what other Georgian officials are saying about the conflict.
Around 2 p.m. that day, Ossetian artillery fire resumed, targeting Georgian positions in the village of Avnevi in South Ossetia. The barrage continued for several hours. Two Georgian peacekeepers were killed, the first deaths among Georgians in South Ossetia since the 1990s, according to Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze, who spoke in a telephone briefing Aug. 14…But by evening, Kezerashvili said, the Georgian side had had enough.
“At 6, I gave the order to prepare everything, to go out from the bases,” he said in an interview Aug. 14 at a Georgian position along the Tbilisi-Gori highway. Kezerashvili described the movement of armor, which included tanks, 122mm howitzers and 203mm self-propelled artillery, as a show of force designed to deter the Ossetians from continuing to barrage the Georgian troops’ positions inside South Ossetia.
Western officials in and around South Ossetia also recorded the troop and armor movement, according to a Western diplomat who described in detail on-the-ground reports by monitors from the OSCE. The monitors recorded the movement of BM-21s in the late afternoon…
At 7 p.m., with troops on the march, Saakashvili went on national television and declared a unilateral cease-fire. “We offer all of you partnership and friendship,” he said to the South Ossetians. “We are ready for any sort of agreement in the interest of peace.”
About 9 p.m., the Ossetians complained to Western monitors about the military traffic, according to a diplomat in Tbilisi.
Totten is being fed disinformation. And he doesn’t know enough to say so, since by his own admission (of not even knowing the context of this war, to say nothing of the others) he went into the country—just like his colleague Brietbart in Baku—knowing absolutely nothing about the place beforehand. He does not understand enough about the hatred in the area that exists on both sides to parse through the endless dissembling (Goltz is an amazing writer, but he is also unabashedly anti-Russian). Nor does he seem to understand the right before president Saakashvili invaded the territory, he called for a unilateral cease-fire in an attempt to roll through Tskhinvali unopposed (Russian-sponsored teenagers reportedly hurled molotov cocktails at Georgian tanks).
For example, the Georgians were still incredibly brutal to the South Ossetians, which makes the complaints about Russian brutality ring a tiny bit hollow. Totten doesn’t get at any of this, because he didn’t do a single jot of homework before heading out to these places.
Which is a real shame. But it’s yet another way in which the “power of blogs” continues to utterly fail us.
Update: Well, Totten has demanded an apology for “lying about him in public.” And told me to get off his blog. I’m happy to oblige, but Totten doesn’t get off that easily. I haven’t misrepresented a thing he’s said, since it is painfully obvious that not only was he presenting an incredibly biased version of events, but that he did not know a thing about the conflict before he arrived. To quote his own entry ...
Complete text are here >>>
No comments:
Post a Comment