CNN Interviews Itself

This is not a plea for Russia’s case. All sides have made plenty of mistakes. This is a plea for better, more even coverage of this ongoing standoff. Unfortunately, most of the Western coverage has been sloppily, dangerously lopsided in Georgia’s favor.

On Friday, CNN interviewed Fareed Zakaria, the host of “Fareed Zakaria: GPS” on his opinions on Russia.

“Zakaria: [Russia's] recognition of the two provinces is a joke. Almost no country in the world has followed them in this recognition.”

It is true that most Western states have dismissed Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence. The post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States has proved to be disjointed and embarrassingly passive in its reaction.

But how can anyone condemn or dismiss these claims to independence after supporting and embracing Kosovo’s? How it can be dismissed as a “joke”, when Georgia has lost all control of the two regions in recent years? South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s economies have functioned independently from Georgia for years and both republics have appealed to the United Nations, Russia, CIS and EU states as recently as March 2008 to recognize their independence?

Some of the people in these regions are aware of the large-scale geopolitical games and violations of international law committed in their name.  Most just yearn for an end to years of uncertainty and violence. The continuous buildup of military force on both Georgian and Russian sides over the last several months caused the latest flare-up.

“Zakaria: So they might be willing to reverse themselves on this issue. But I can’t see them getting out completely.”

CNN: So Russia wins? [CNN apparently thinks a centuries-old geopolitical conflict is a zero-sum game. Typically, the CNN president recently revealed the network has approached this year’s presidential campaign as a “very long baseball season”.]

Zakaria: Well, even if it wins in the narrow sense, it will lose in a broader sense. Russia’s actions have scared all their neighbors, aroused anti-Russian nationalism, driven the Poles, the Ukrainians and so many other countries closer to the West and away from Moscow.

Countries around the world have been startled by the Soviet-era tactics. And what have they gained for all this? South Ossetia. I think this will go down in history as a major strategic blunder. The Russians have massively overplayed their hand.

So Russia has overplayed its hand. And what legitimacy did the U.S. have for supplying Georgia with arms and training its troops? What about the US humvees discovered near the Georgian port of Poti and the U.S. passport found among the Georgian special forces unit?

Georgia is not even a NATO state yet, so what is the legal basis for US military presence in Georgia? The U.S. naval ships, which are not usually used for carrying humanitarian aid, are still in the Black Sea making the Russian military nervous.

Russia has indeed isolated itself as a result, but Russia did not “gain” South Ossetia. Neither South Ossetia or Abkhazia made appeals or drafted petions addressing annexation.  

Zakaria: The rise of Russian nationalism, an anti-Western and anti-democratic movement, the rise of an elected dictatorship, and above all, the rise in oil wealth, which always produces corruption, dysfunction and arrogance. Russia has moved in anti-modern directions, and much of it has nothing to do with what the West did or didn’t do.

According to the Washington establishment, Russia is “anti-modern” and Georgia is a beacon of democracy. Both, however, banned each other’s television networks and used less than democratic means to crackdown on political opposition. Oddly though, in the U.S. you only hear about big bad Russia oppressing small democratic Georgia.  

Check out EurasiaNet’s coverage of the conflict, appropriately titled “Georgia in Crisis”. EurasiaNet.org is a project of the George Soros’ Open Society Institute, which has championed Mr. Saakashvili’s own rise to power.

If “corruption, dysfunction and arrogance” are symptoms of “anti-modern” societies, then the politics of the Bush administration and their conduct of the war in Iraq must have spurred the post-modern Dark Ages.

I would not be so sure about the role of the West. As the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world, the United States had many opportunities it did not take advantage of.

“The United States did not have a consistent policy towards Russia,” the president of the Brookings Institute Strobe Talbott recently told a Russian magazine The New Times. “When Bush came to the Oval Office, he considered Russia as a second-rate country. It was a colossal mistake, because Russia is not a type of country you can regard as irrelevant.”

The persistent choice of words like “Russian invasion” and “annexation”, which continue to dominate Western coverage of the conflict, is also a misleading and colossal mistake.

Here is a recent AP story stubbornly referring to the “Russian invasion”. And this show will go on.