Blogoir: August

What will happen when this strong, self made woman who exploded on the Alaska scene by taking on and defeating the good old boy network in Alaska stands in front of the citizens of the United States and says she has done this all while caring for and nurturing 4 kids and a husband, and draws a compassionate line in the sand by saying I chose to have a beautiful child who we knew would possibly have Downs Syndrome and that was the greatest decision I have ever made and the best gift I have ever been given a child who is the love of my life!

Posted by a reader responding to this.

The next few weeks should be quite a ride in the very history of democracy.

Every Republican attack on Obama will be denounced by Democrats as ill-disguised racism.

Every Democratic attack on McCain/Palin will be denounced by Republicans as ill-disguised sexism.

It's all summed up handily here.

Remember Bill Ayers?

He's back. And not everyone is happy about it, trying to bully the issue off the US airways.

Those horrid right-wing Republican smears! Trying to link Obama to a respectable, nay mainstream figure in the progressive camp. Whatever next?

Some good advice to the Obama team.

Stories of stunning human achievements are always inspiring.

But, facile as we usually are, we tend to dwell on 'immediate' visible triumphs in eg sport or the arts, and to ignore the mind-boggling successes of engineers and scientists.

So have a look at this fine article from 2005 to help correct the balance.

I have opined about the Rules purporting to lay down what diplomats can and can't say once they leave the FCO. See eg here.

Now my former colleage Sir Edward Clay has reiterated his concerns about the FCO Rules:

The rule requires former diplomats to consult about any proposed public comment - written, broadcast, in press articles, books, school debates - reflecting their career experience. This is not about official secrets. It is an attempt to convert a career-long professional duty of personal discretion into submission to censorship until death...

The worrying thing is not only regulation 5 but its vague scope and application. My part-time job was withdrawn hours after I commented on Radio 4's Today programme and in the Guardian about the government's suppression of the SFO's inquiries into BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia damaging the credibility of its policies on good governance and corruption. This action reinforced my point.

... The FCO must rethink regulation 5 again, this time with more respect for freedom and for informed discussion of foreign policy. It should also publish its regulations: officials have a right to know which of the limitations on their liberty that they accept on joining the FCO will endure when they leave; citizens should also know by what decrees they are denied access to the views of former public servants.

Of course officials already do have the right to know these 'limitations on their liberty'. And is there really an issue about such Rules being published for the edification of the public?

Strive as I do to be indignant about all this, I fail.

Here I am, more recently retired than Edward Clay, blogging and writing away, often in a way highly critical of HMG positions. Yet I clear nothing with the FCO in advance, nor have they made any attempt to shut me up.

So in practice the impact of the Rules is not necessarily 'draconian', although I am not revealing/analysing operational decisions by Ministers on a highly controversial topic such as the decision to invade Iraq.

This is where Sir J Greenstock's book on Iraq has been left in the fridge. See his own characteristically gracious and sensible views in this lively exchange.

And whereas I suspect almost every serious serving diplomat accepts reasonable limitations on how far sensitive information gleaned during a career is published afterwards (and when), any such limitations are bound to be 'vague' to some degree.

The problem at the heart of all this is twofold:

• weak Ministers in a weak government annoyed at some disloyal former civil servants' memoirs, but themselves pouring fuel on the flames by employing their creepy armies of SpAds who hope to cash in when they leave office by throwing around internal gossip
• a serious incongruity between (a) any norms laying down post-career guidelines for publication, and (b) the fact that huge amounts of stuff can be prised from the system anyway via wily Freedom of Information Act applications.

In short, not a sinister attempt to censor until death. Rather the normal muddle of a democratic society.

Welcome Instapundit readers.

David Miliband puts forward the best available case for why the Kosovo precedent has no bearing on the Georgia case:

Some argue that Russia has done nothing not previously done by Nato in Kosovo in 1999. But this comparison does not bear serious examination.

Leave to one side that Russia spends a lot of time arguing in the UN and elsewhere against "interference" in internal affairs, whether in Zimbabwe or Burma. Nato's actions in Kosovo followed dramatic and systematic abuse of human rights, culminating in ethnic cleansing on a scale not seen in Europe since the second world war. Nato acted over Kosovo only after intensive negotiations in the UN security council and determined efforts at peace talks. Special envoys were sent to warn Milosevic in person of the consequences of his actions. None of this can be said for Russia's use of force in Georgia.

The decision to recognise Kosovo's independence came only after Russia made clear it would veto the deal proposed by the UN secretary general's special envoy, former Finnish President Ahtisaari. Even then we agreed to a further four months of negotiations by an EU-US-Russia troika in order to ensure that no stone was left unturned in the search for a mutually acceptable compromise.

It is easy enough to draw clear factual and policy distinctions between Georgia and Kosovo. Comparing them is stupid!

And yet some not obviously stupid people do compare them:

President Dmitry Medvedev has declared that Russia formally recognises the independence of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Mr Medvedev told the BBC Russia had tried to preserve Georgian unity for 17 years, but that the situation had changed after this month's violence ... Moscow now felt obliged to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia as other countries had done with Kosovo.

The Point is this.

It is trite to identify similarities and differences between the Kosovo and Georgia precedents. Rummage around in these issues and you'll find what you're looking for.

The actual 'Kosovo precedent' is not about the merits of the specific case(s). It is about the unwisdom of launching a lunge at Kosovo recognition in the face of serious objections within the EU and round the planet.

Kosovo's failure to establish itself quickly and uncontroversially as an independent state recognised round the world is remarkable. Kosovo declared its independence in February this year. Since then a mere 46 UN member states have recognised it. The absence from that list of all the big hitters in the Muslim world (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria) not to mention India and China is especially striking.

After the initial flurry only four more countries have signed up since May. It is hard to think of a comparable example of a significant body of states recognising a new member of the international fold, but a much greater number not doing so.

This shows up a Deep Issue. The countries of the world are a disparate, squabbling lot, but they do take one (for them) existential issue supremely seriously. When is a country a country? Who joins the Countries Club, and on what terms?

The diplomatic practice in past decades has been based on the operational wisdom of establishing a wide consensus before admitting new members to the Club. And of ensuring that UNSC permanent members are at one - see eg Taiwan.

The Miliband article glosses over the problems which he knew were bound to be caused by proceeding with Kosovo recognition in the face of a strong Russian objection and evident Chinese/Indian unhappiness.

See eg this:

But the US and UK as fellow UNSC members did not respect Russia's objections when pressing ahead with Kosovo recognition, even though Russia had made it unambiguously clear that pursuing such recognition would have 'implications' for eg Georgia.

In short, Washington and London were struck by (and yielded to) the intensity of tiny Albanian nationalism, but underestimated the intensity of far mightier Russian nationalism. I warned London myself about this risk several times as HM Ambassador in Poland. To no avail.

In all the weary meanderings under New Labour about the UK's foreign policy objectives/targets/priorities and (now) Policy Goals, is not this a comprehensive - and unforgivable - blunder of basic professional technique?

How will the mass of states round the world react now?

Most will be privately aghast at Russia's banal power-play to dismember Georgia.

Some may think that this is a reason to move to recognise Kosovo but not Abkhazia and S Ossetia, as a gesture of protest against crass Russian land-grabbing beyond its borders.

But I suspect that the great majority will keep avert their eyes from this shambles, torn unhappily between deriving private satisfaction from the unedifying disagreements between UNSC members on this core international law issue - and fervently hoping that violent separatist urges in their own respective parts of the world are not given new impulses.

Gordon Brown: the changing global order cannot be governed by institutions designed in the middle of the last century. We now know how much more we have to do to create an effective system of international rules. We must strengthen the system of global governance to meet the challenges of our interdependent world.

This windy rhetoric makes no sense. We all have invested in the UN system for decades, precisely to do this.

But let's be honest. Our own clumsy Balkans policy based on scissors and paste improvisation at the UN has messed things up.

Analysis/comment on Georgia/Russia gushes out. EU leaders meet tomorrow.

Hence we have the latest UK positions as described by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and (today) Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

These senior British statements are both alas inelegantly drafted. Who is preparing these texts for our leaders - and are they themselves reading them before signing them off?

Take the Prime Minister's opening paragraph:

Twenty years ago, as the Berlin Wall fell, people assumed the end of hostility between East and West, and a new world order founded on common values. As part of this, 10 Eastern European states joined Nato and intensified co-operation with Europe and more wanted to follow. But Russia's hostile action towards Georgia suggests that they are unreconciled to this new reality.

Huh? Who is the 'they' in that last sentence:

Or David Miliband's weird opening words:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has seemed that new rules were being established for the conduct of international relations in central and eastern Europe and central Asia. The watchwords were independence and interdependence; sovereignty and mutual responsibility; cooperation and common interests. They are good words that need to be defended.

Don't they teach grammar in the FCO ("it has seemed that new rules were being established...")? Why do 'good words' need defending? A fun new lexicographic role for NATO here?

These infelicities aside, what exactly do we think that the UK plus its allies and partners should do about Georgia and the wider questions the Russian intervention raises? According to these statements the menu is something like this:

• consider meeting more frequently as G7 (ie put the G8 grouping including Russia into deep freeze - a good idea as far as it goes)
• help Georgia with humanitarian assistance (the UK's two million pounds package looks a bit feeble here?)
• deploy peace monitors to better judge violations of the ceasefire, appoint a senior figure to drive the humanitarian and political effort, and support the Nato Georgia Commission, with a Nato team sent to Georgia (modest 'do something' bits and bobs)
• demand the withdrawal of Russian troops to their August 7 positions (notable absence of any insistence that Russia reverse its recognition of S Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states: maybe wise, as Russia won't do it? But how does the 'West' plan to deal with these territories now?)
• review relations with Russia 'root and branch' (these meetings will be fascinating officials, but with a view to achieving what?)
• press European leaders to increase funding for a project to allow us to source energy from the Caspian Sea, reducing our dependence on Russia (do we really think that this is going to work?)
• Miliband: "re-balance the energy relationship with Russia. Europe needs to invest in storing gas to deal with interruptions. More interconnections between countries and properly functioning internal markets will increase resilience. It needs diverse, secure and resilient gas supplies" (fine in theory, but no serious impact likely for many years to come)
• Brown: "add urgency to the work on Europe's energy agenda. We must more rapidly build relationships with other producers of oil and gas. Our response must include a redoubling of our efforts to complete a single market in gas and electricity, a collective defence to secure our energy supplies" (ditto)
• support Ukraine's EU membership aspirations (good - but will the EU do it?)
• Brown: We now know how much more we have to do to create an effective system of international rules. We must strengthen the system of global governance to meet the challenges of our interdependent world. We must reshape our global architecture to meet the new challenges: climate change, energy security, poverty, migration. (This incantation is getting  wearisome. There are international rules aplenty at the moment - the problem comes when they are broken)

And so on.

If I were in the Kremlin I would not be too bothered by such rumblings.

And I'd keep printing the Russian passports.

Prompted by Karadzic's transfer to ICTY, here in the new issue of Total Politics is a piece from me on my encounters with two other Bosnian Serb leaders convicted by ICTY for crimes against humanity.

What are these people like?

Are they obvious monsters? If not that, at least patently weird? Or seemingly normal people who somehow ‘lost it' on a massive scale?

Read on ...

Russia has responded ingeniously to the argument that its forces should leave Georgia - by redefining Georgia!

Having announced that Russia recognises the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, Moscow now can say that its troops on the ground in these territories are no longer in Georgia. Howzat?

As and when needed it also has the option of proclaiming some sort of a new 'union' of these territories with Russia, so that any attack on them is an attack on Russia itself.   

Sorted?

Recognising the 'independence' of Abkhazia and South Ossetia needs international support. And Moscow is off to a strong start, with Hizbollah, Syria and Belarus looking to be on side.

This manoeuvre gives Russia a veneer of international law legitimacy at least one molecule thick. But that, combined with Facts on the Ground, might be enough for the Kremlin's immediate purposes:

"Hey, Kosovo has not been recognised by anything close to a majority of states round the world. Nor have S Ossetia and Abkhazia. What's the difference?"

Meanwhile is Russia playing chess while the Americans are playing Monopoly? Thus:

The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

However:

Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.  

... like a good chess player, Putin has the end-game in mind as he fights for control of the board in the early stages of the game. Demographics stand at the center of Putin's calculation, and Russians are the principal interest that the Russian Federation has in its so-called near abroad. The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the Federation - most controversially in Ukraine.

What if this is at least plausible? That Russia wants to redefine the post-Cold war settlement by scooping within its borders most Russians left adrift when the Soviet Union collapsed?

There are two ways to achieve this.

• Crank up separatist plebiscites in Kazakhstan and Ukraine where the largest Russian communities live, then push through partition. Absorb Belarus one Sunday afternoon. Brutal - but potentially decisive.
• Or try to force Kazakhstan and Ukraine into some sort of more explicit formal union with Russia so that all their respective dealings with the USA/EU are conducted on Russian terms - no more creeping Westernisation or 'Europeanisation'. Less brutal, less decisive.

Maybe even Putin's Moscow does not have the nerve for the unheavals which entering such unfathomable complications would create.

So instead for now it can keep the game in a state of dynamic imbalance. Grab a couple of pawns from Georgia and leave the threat that this is part of a wider ruthless strategy hanging menacingly over the board?

Foreign Policy.

On a Grand Scale.

Back in quite deep Oxfordshire from Orlando, via a horrible early morning experience today at T4 at Heathrow.

The sheer shabbiness there is bad enough when compared to the hi-end bright and clean Orlando/Newark terminals, but I had never before encountered in the UK a 100m plus queue to get to passport control. What a mess.

Anyway, thanks to loyal readers (and welcome to visitors from Instapundit and Austin Bay) for making August a bumper month even though for the past few days I have given blogoiring a rest.

Or maybe people like it when I don't say anything. Hmm.

One way or the other, a million hits on the site so far this year, and even if many of them are e-spiders scurrying round the Internet to sell Viagra that is still a plumply satisfactory number.

What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities.

Who else but Mark Steyn? She sure gets my vote.

Few if any entries in the coming week as the sun finally emerges in Florida after Tropical Storm Fay. Back to normal service at the end of August.

Just to add that timeshare salesmen in this part of the world are startlingly good.

We were offered the usual free donuts and coffee plus an $80 gift voucher if we 'took the tour' and heard the presentation. So we signed up.

The first salesman hit us with the first offer to extract $30,000 from us. Charmingly done, but fairly easily rebuffed. Then came three more in Star Wars-like space fighter attack waves, peppering us with amazing deals of ingenious shapes and sizes.

It takes nerves of steel to sit through this and not agree to buy something. They make you feel guilty that you have not bought at least a two-week holiday for $2,000.

Somehow we managed it. And departed with the voucher. Better than last year when I walked out in a rage and skipped the voucher.

Timeshare is easy.

Don't.

This reads well:

Imagine what modern Europe would look like now if Poland had the political status of Georgia, lying in some sort of political-moral twilight zone with former Soviet interests linked to the KGB having a far freer time to penetrate into that society and play games with Polish assets.

As does this:

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:

The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others...

... Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit...

... International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.

That sort of analysis rests on certain ... psychological assumptions.

One of them is that the reply will not be something like this:

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Do we really look like a country with a plan? We don't have a plan.

The EU has plans, the World Bank has plans. You know what we are, West? We're a dog chasing cars. We wouldn't know what to do if we caught one. 

We just do things. We're a wrench in the gears. We hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's.

Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

So when I say that what happened to Georgia, your girlfriend, wasn't personal, you know I'm telling the truth.

You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.

But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos, West? It's fair.

Hmm. Doesn't this sound ... familiar?

More on Russia, always a rich seam for foreign policy First Principles.

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife. They will become willing to play with the west by western rules only if or when they no longer perceive those rules as disadvantaging themselves. Today they cannot compete on the EU's terms, still less those of the US, so they make up their own.

It is unnecessary for the west silently to acquiesce in the Russians' excesses, but it must tread cautiously in the face of their sensitivities.

Maybe the fact that we in the UK tread cautiously in the face of the sensitivities of street kids with knives accounts for this?

More from Max:

America must stop pretending that democracy is, of itself, the answer to all the world's ills ... US policy towards Moscow for almost two decades has been based upon the assumption that since the Russians were losers, their wishes could be ignored or defied on every front. No useful business could result from such a posture.

Blimey.

Democracy may not deal with the world's ills but it makes a good step in that direction. Indeed, the problem in Georgia is that the Russian leadership want to send a profound anti-democratic signal that Might is Right - that what Russia wants or needs is the uber-value in that part of the world. See this latest outburst from the reportedly mild-mannered President Medvedev.

Plus the USA in fact has spent large sums of money in and with Russia on all sorts of common projects, aimed at building a new sense of partnership. The problem is not that the Americans treat the Russians as losers. It is that the Russians behave like losers, unable to make do with their sprawling eleven time zones of territory and hankering after regaining former imperial lands elsewhere.

One recurring theme in Russian and some Western analysis is the deterministic but weird idea that Russia has to behave differently (ie badly) because it is 'surrounded by enemies'.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests.

As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

If a country occupies such a vast land mass as Russia does, it necessarily has plenty of neighbours and all sorts of complex questions to deal with. The Russian problem is that it tends to see anything it does not like as 'hostile'. And that attitude extends even to the Bambi-ish spread of EU values and processes into eg Ukraine.

Because, of course, the point is not that 'Russia' has a problem with that. Rather the Russian post-KGB elite have the problem, since the spread of Western democratic values brings with it new transparency and reliance on open rules rather than shadowy power-plays. And that threatens both their biznes interests and their world-view.

Above all, the Western democracy which is sneered at so much in the West brings with it a sense that political behaviour has (and depends on) Limits - limits of law, of convention, of personal self-restraint..

Here is the profound cultural/philosophical difference between Russia and the West.

'The West' sees Limits as a source of strength. 'Russia' sees Limits as a form of weakness.

Max does not seem to get this:

... the west (sic) will find it easier to coexist with this tormented, intransigent, melancholy and oil-rich neighbour when Russia feels comfortable with itself, not when its nose is rubbed in its long history of failure.

This has to be mainly wrong. No serious community policy can be based round the idea that we all wait for the inner city street kid with knife to 'feel comfortable with himself', if his idea of being comfortable is to slash away at smaller kids who disagree with him.

If we are not brave enough to take away his knife and haul him off to therapy, we at least need to limit his room for slashing and to do a lot more to help defend themselves those he threatens ? 

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with the poetry professor and had a “War is Harmful to Children and Other Living Things” poster on her dorm room wall and gave the Black Power salute to the other white kids and worshipped Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and always argued in class that communism had never really been given a proper try, so why not here and why not now?

But that generation was pretty tough. O.K., they lost Vietnam to a bunch of guys in pajamas but they took to the streets in Hillary’s hometown of Chicago and bloodied the pigs pretty good. They blew up buildings — Bambi’s mentor, Bill Ayers, comes to mind — and even killed some people. Charlie Manson gave the whole movement a bad name and the Rolling Stones didn’t help when that black guy got murdered at Altamont, but you see what I’m driving at: Hillary’s minions know how to party.

As if the EU's ambiguous response to the Georgia crisis was not depressing enough, life is getting tougher on the economic side too in Europe:

The eurozone as a whole shrank by 0.2pc, the first contraction since the launch of the single currency a decade ago. Germany led the slide with a fall of 0.5pc. France and Italy fell 0.3pc. The delayed effects of the strong euro, tight credit, and slowing exports have now kicked in with a vengeance.

Problems for my own British-based budget as we sit in muggy Orlando:

The pound could soon dive to barely more than a dollar and a half while gold prices plunge to $650, experts predicted yesterday amid fresh evidence that the commodity boom is ending and the dollar's resurgence is under way.

But whereas the UK can hope to use its currency as a set of buffers, the Eurozone faces much more searching internal strains:

... the euro is nothing like the dollar. It has no European government, tax, or social security system to back it up. Each member country is sovereign, each fiercely proud, answering to its own ancient rythms.

It lacks the mechanism of "fiscal transfers" to switch money to depressed regions. The Babel of languages keeps workers pinned down in their own country. The escape valve of labour mobility is half-blocked. We are about to find out whether EMU really has the levels of political solidarity of a nation, the kind that holds America's currency union together through storms.

My guess is that political protest will mark the next phase of this drama. Almost half a million people have lost their jobs in Spain alone over the last year. At some point, the feeling of national impotence in the face of monetary rule from Frankfurt will erupt into popular fury. The ECB will swallow its pride and opt for a weak euro policy, or face its own destruction.

Gulp. 

Michael Binyon deploys chess metaphors to describe Russia' s military push into Georgia:

Vladimir Putin lost several pawns on the chessboard - Kosovo, Iraq, Nato membership for the Baltic states, US renunciation of the ABM treaty, US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. But he waited.

The trap was set in Georgia. When President Saakashvili blundered into South Ossetia, sending in an army to shell, kill and maim on a vicious scale (against US advice and his promised word), Russia was waiting ...

... Moscow can also counter Georgian PR, the last weapon left to Tbilisi. Human rights? Look at what Georgia has done in South Ossetia (and also in Abkhazia). National sovereignty? Look at the detachment of Kosovo from Serbia. False pretexts? Look at Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada to “rescue” US medical students. Western outrage? Look at the confused cacophony.

There are lessons everywhere. To the former Soviet republics - remember your geography. To Nato - do you still want to incorporate Caucasian vendettas into your alliance? To Tbilisi - do you want to keep a President who brought this on you? To Washington - does Russia's voice still count for nothing? Like it or not, it counts for a lot.

Let's dwell on that chess metaphor a while.

Aron Nimzowitsch was a great chess Grandmaster. One of his famous reputed chess aphorisms is "the threat is stronger than the execution".

The sense is that one can wait for some time to play a strong chess move, letting the threat that it might happen create new advantages. However, once the move is played the threat is gone and the move stands on its own merits. And, of course, the move is 'committal' - once played it can not be taken back.

In this case the Russians have been watching the Kosovo precedent and waiting to move.

One possible move was to stand firm on rejecting Kosovo independence. Another was to say that if Kosovo gets what it wants, why should not some others do the same?

The Georgian episode opens the way for Moscow to play the second move, as looks to be happening: "Georgia's territorial integrity is a dead issue".

However, Russia is a UN Security Council Permanent Member so such moves have to be wrapped in some sort of credible international law ribbon.

By parking on unbending opposition to the Kosovo precedent, Russia claimed to rule out ad hoc exceptions to a key precept of international practice in Europe in recent decades, namely that borders can not be changed without general consent.

What exactly is Russia now saying?

That if a country behaves badly enough towards minority territories, those territories can break away?

That any territory can break away if it has a strong supportive neighbour?

Or is there a new realpolitik doctrine emerging, that a new twilight zone category of small pseudo-states might emerge whose 'independence' is recognised by a core of supporters but not the international community as a whole? See also Transdnistria.

These questions have mind-boggling political and diplomatic ramifications rippling on down the decades to come. What looks like a strong move now may (or may not) come to look like a mistake.

For now Russia has all sorts of operational options in Georgia, using the presence of Russian official and unofficial forces on the ground to play for time and create (as we chess-players say) unfathomable complications.

For a famous example of such complications, see Game 14 of the World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vishy Anand. At the height of the battle (and the Championship struggle as a whole) with both players short of time, Kasparov on move 27 made a dramatic speculative knight sacrifice throwing the position wide open. He outplayed his opponent in the ensuing dog-fight.

Putin maybe has in mind a famous American example:

I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.

The commentaries on Georgia pour out.

This one by John Bolton is sharp and good. Try this:

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

And this:

The West, collectively, failed in this crisis. Georgia wasted its dime making that famous 3am telephone call to the White House, the one Hillary Clinton referred to in a campaign ad questioning Barack Obama’s fitness for the Presidency.

The point being:

 ... we are facing the much larger issue of how Russia plans to behave in international affairs for decades to come. Whether Mikhail Saakashvili “provoked” the Russians on August 8, or September 8, or whenever, this rape was well-planned and clearly coming, given Georgia’s manifest unwillingness to be “Finlandized” – the Cold War term for effectively losing your foreign-policy independence.

Hence:

 ... we should have a foreign-minister-level meeting of Nato to reverse the spring capitulation at Bucharest, and to decide that Georgia and Ukraine will be Nato’s next members. By drawing the line clearly, we are not provoking Russia, but doing just the opposite: letting them know that aggressive behaviour will result in costs that they will not want to bear, thus stabilising a critical seam between Russia and the West.

 ... Russia did not invade Georgia with diplomats or roubles, but with tanks. This is a security threat, and the proper forum for discussing security threats on the border of a Nato member – yes, Europe, this means Turkey – is Nato.

Saying this may cause angst in Europe’s capitals, but now is the time to find out if Nato can withstand a potential renewed confrontation with Moscow, or whether Europe will cause Nato to wilt. Far better to discover this sooner rather than later, when the stakes may be considerably higher.

What is interesting about Issues is that they do not go away even when we do not want to look at them.

'Europe' (in this case the EU) finds some things Just Too Difficult.

One example. Which countries are in Europe? This simple question is highly unsimple and (worse) uncomfortable, since to answer it clearly opens the prospect of EU membership to those countries who qualify.

Those EU members who (a) do not want much further enlargement and (b) see the EU above all as some sort of balance to the USA do not want to think about bringing any more of the former Soviet republics into the European fold. To do so opens questions about Russia's role which (they think) are best left unopened.

Alas for them the Russian intervention in Georgia does open that question.

So, EU. Are we going to stand nervously inside our fence listening to the cries for help of people looking remarkably like Europeans hammering at the gate as they get savaged by bears?

Back in the West, there is a health and safety policy I have not seen before here at Aquatica, the new water-park next to SeaWorld in Orlando.

As one waits in line for a good splashy ride, a tape-recording in a prissy male Australian voice tells us all that:

Your security is our number one concern. Therefore, lifeguards may not make eye-contact when speaking to you. Nothing personal, mates. No worries!

Huh?

Does eye-contact with lifeguards make some people feel insecure? Or is it that the lifeguards' beady eyes must be roving ceaselessly to spot potential trouble and so they may not have time to alight on you, so please do not feel offended? Something else?

I have sent a message to Customer Relations to ask. Always nice to know what is going on.

Update: almost instantaneous and friendly replies from Aquatica saying that indeed the point is that the lifeguards need to be looking everywhere so may not have eyes for you when talking. I have pointed out that that is not clear from the way the warning is phrased. Over to senior management.

Here is Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mikhail Gorbachev piously enjoining people in the Caucasus to live together nicely:

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force - both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar - it only made the situation worse...

What happened on the night of August 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenceless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity...

... Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of US instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of Nato membership, emboldened Georgian leaders.

... Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development...

The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible...

What a superb performance. These Russian communists sure have staying-power.

A couple of the more obvious points:

1)     The roots of this problem are not to be found in 1991, but rather in the preceding decades of Soviet brutalisation of Georgia which continued while said Gorbachev was still in power. Eg this example of the Gorbachev communists tackling the National Question in Georgia in 1989:

At the dawn, the Soviet special task forces attacked the demonstration with sharpened spades and poisonous gases, killing twenty-two demonstrators, mostly women and teens. Some two thousands were left sick for weeks and months, in hospitals and at home, from the toxic gases. The brutality of the Soviet forces against the peaceful demonstrators was recorded on the tape and shocked entire Soviet Union. A number of cases of ethnic hatred by the Soviet soldiers was attested. As witnesses recalled, some soldiers, while battering victims with trenching spades, were yelling "This is what you get for Stalin."

2)     Gorbachev insinuates that Georgia is to blame for the current violence, egged on by the USA. No mention of the dismal Russian record in South Ossetia over the past decade or so.

3)     Most impressively, Gorbachev calls for a "sub-regional system of security and cooperation". That is Communist for "just give us back the Soviet empire and leave us Russians alone and all will be well". The whole problem is that parts of the former Soviet Union and indeed parts of Russia itself do not want to be in Russia's 'sub-regional security system'. Why should they be, when Russia is giving them only insecurity and lumpen corruption?

Gorbachev deservedly crashed from power because he believed in replacing discredited Soviet Imperialism with a fizzy and brightly packaged new product, Soviet Imperialism Lite.

Seems he is still selling it. And that the Guardian is still buying it.