So what if it becomes clear that they can’t win quickly? Ethnic cleansing looks like a sweet deal to start with. Someplace where your people are in the large majority, and you throw out the minority and take their stuff—we did it after our revolution, tories left behind lots of good stuff when they ran for their lives. But sometimes it goes the other way round and you have to take care of refugees from places that your people are the minority, and it drags on.

If we evacuate all the noncombatants then what is there to win? You aren’t fighting to protect your family, they’re gone. You aren’t fighting to protect your nation, it went with your family. Your land has only killers on it, tearing things up. And if it got some disreputable killer-tourists taking advantage then it isn’t even heroic. You aren’t fighting your ancestral enemies who want to take your land, part of the time you’re fighting random maniacs who wouldn’t even be there if you still had a society.

A few places like that might serve as a horrible example to other places where the ethnic tensions could get out of hand. And possibly people like Bush and Saakashvili and Putin would less often want that result. A bunch of refugees, a violent anarchic no-man’s-land, who benefits? Well, they might think they benefit.

But those manipulated people? If every woman in the country understands that ethnic violence means she’s going to have to leave her home and go live in some foreign country for years, there’s just a chance they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen.

On the other hand if we had a lot to do with getting them into it and now we’re not doing much of anything to help, they won’t be so grateful. I dunno.

What about Mossy’s question? What should the georgian government have done? One alternative would have been to send in their military to help get georgian refugees out of ossetia. That way at least fewer georgians get killed during the ethnic cleansing. That would be unsatisfying, of course. Would it have made sense for them to start clearing out ossetians who live near the georgian border as a sort of compensation? Truck georgian refugees in the direction of georgia, and ossetian refugees deeper into ossetia, so that the ethnic cleansing wouldn’t be so one-sided?

In general, is there some good way to deal with ethnic cleansing issues? It’s bad when people can’t get along and some of them get killed or driven from their homes. Much better when they do get along. Can we use military force to make people get along when they don’t want to, or is that force restricted to deciding who wins?

I think it’s mostly restricted to helping decide who wins. Military units can’t keep small groups of people in mixed neighborhoods from murdering each other and getting away with it. The most they can do is herd people into defensible encampments and try to defend them there.

So here’s an idea that seemed crazy to me when I first thought of it. Say an area is demonstrated to be suffering from ethnic cleansing. Then “we” (meaning the USA or the UN or whoever can be trusted with the job) send in an army to supervise evacuation of anybody who calls himself a noncombatant. “We” move them all to places that accept refugees, and then we let the combatants fight it out. Declare the place a lawless area, and don’t prosecute anybody for crimes committed there or extridite people to there. At some time (maybe a minimum of 5 years?) we see whether somebody has a credible claim to a government that has suppressed the violence, and if so we recognise that government and let refugees move back provided they want to.

Let anybody walk into the lawless zone or walk out. If reckless citizens of the georgia in the USA want to take shooting vacations in the lawless zone, let them. (Their insurance companies might have something to say about it.) As long as people want to fight over that land, as long as nobody can stop the fighting, let the volunteers fight. But keep noncombatants out of it.

I don’t exactly like this approach, but it’s relatively cheap and it might do as much good as we can actually do.

Sure, but there’s nothing remarkable about it, it’s everywhere – ‘muslims are terrorists’, ‘Arabs can’t be trusted’, and you can find it all right on the pages of the NYT and WSJ.

Are the South Ossetians different from other people, are they more willing to believe wild conspiracy theories than the others? You yourself seem to have no problem believing wild conspiracy theories spread by this Latynina person. She has excellent sources? I’m sure the South Ossetians do too.

Just reverse South Ossetia and Georgia in those sentences and see how it sounds …

Both versions are probably true.

I hate to sound even more pompous and/or boring, but couldn’t Saakashvili negotiate …?

“… like evil russians kill lots of civilians on purpose while we kill a few civilians by accident when we can’t win without collateral damage …”

Now that’s what I call a fantasy world. I suggest you read more history. Start with the native Americans, pass through several Latin American countries, visit Vietnam, and end up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or do you think that bombing village compounds in Afghanistan is unavoidable “collateral damage”, otherwise known as murdering innocent people. Put yourself in an Afghan’s shoes. No, really …

Here is a good article – it has everything, “the mystery and the murder”, the NATO and Georgia, and comes from Stratfor:
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/russo_georgian_war_and_balance_power

Okay, let’s say you’re right (and you are) that bombing the South Ossetians didn’t help. So he doesn’t. And a number of Georgian villages are destroyed and there are a bunch of tanks in South Ossetia. The Georgians are outraged and freaked out. Everyone else is watching the Olympics. Then what happens?

But look back at the earlier discussion. First there’s the idea that russia is running an empire and the USA isn’t, with the various arguments that US client states have so much freedom that they aren’t really part of an empire at all.

And then there’s the idea that even if the US is running an empire, still we have a Good Empire compared to the russian Evil Empire.

And things the USA has done are not considered comparable to things russia has done. Not just quantitatively different, like evil russians kill lots of civilians on purpose while we kill a few civilians by accident when we can’t win without collateral damage etc. Simply incomparable. Because we’re good and they’re evil.

By this logic, it tends to follow that if the USA chooses sides in somebody else’s conflict, the side we support must be good also. Because if they weren’t good we wouldn’t have supported them. So people who say Georgia is not good must be wrong.

If someone is doing this sort of logic, what good is it to argue with them?

You may think that we are “cutting them slack”, I’d disagree. I think we’re quite aware of the Russian jackboot, in the same way that we’re aware of the American jackboot. And what we address are the realities of the world (the concerns of nations) not how we would like the world to be. The only equivalence is that Russia and the US are both countries whose governments act in their perceived self-interest. A proper way to analyse the situation is to place yourself in the shoes of the different parties. Analogies (like the placing of missiles in Mexico) are a useful part of this process – but do not reflect equivalence, just a search for a a better analysis.

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that what Latynina reported was true. What should Saakashvili have done?”

Well I don’t think that shelling the South Ossetians helped … I’ve no doubt that Saakashvili came to power on a (popular) promise of pro-US policy and Georgian nationalism. But then (fulfulling Godwin’s Law) Hitler came to power on a popular promise of righting historical wrongs, and that didn’t get the Germans very far in the long term.

The Caucasus, like the Balkans, is replete with historical grievances, and periodic violence. At the same time it’s full of peoples who live happily alongside each other. Periodically politicians (of all countries, including the US and Russia) come to power who seek to exploit such rivalries for their own ends, and cause mayhem. Such politicians may be popular. It doesn’t make them good.

I have certainly been, uh, adament, in what I have written, because I’m frankly exasperated by the willingness of the American (or largely Western) left and liberals to cut Russia slack while castigating Western powers. That’s going to come back to bite you in the butt. But mostly I wish you’d stop all the dithering up there in the stratosphere and concentrate on the details. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that what Latynina reported was true. What should Saakashvili have done?

I just assumed this was a joke. Russia’s so evil it doesn’t even deserve a capital letter.