Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Who is to blame for the Russo-Georgian war?

Andrew Sullivan blames Bush:
The point here is not that the invasions [the Russian invasion of Georgia and the American invasion of Iraq] are obviously morally equivalent. The point is that the line between American actions in the world and Russia's are no longer as stark as they once were. Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Americans - and Georgians - are now living with the consequences. And I'm angry about it.
It seems clear that Sullivan's "conservatism of doubt" is really just another form of liberalism. In this case, a liberalism that assumes that the one remaining barrier between mankind and heaven on earth is the Bush/Cheney/Rove axis of evil. On the other hand, Barack Obama, being omnipotent and omniscient*, obviously would never have allowed this situation to develop had he been president since 2001.

Vox Day is throwing some of the blame at the Jews:
At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months. As some observers have noted, there's even some reason to believe that the foreign advisors may have been in the forefront of the attack, based on the appearance of the troops and their gear in pictures of the earliest action. (I don't have an opinion on this; I didn't see the pictures myself.) In overreacting to the obvious provocations from the Russian-backed South Ossetians, the Georgians handed Russia the excuse it was quite obviously waiting for.
* Some philosophers believe that this is conclusive proof that Barack Obama does not exist.

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