There Will be Bloodlust
by digby
Following on my posts of the last couple of days about how the neocons will use this Georgia crisis to its political advantage, here's an interesting Q&A with an expert on the region. He says many interesting things about the missteps of the leadership here and in Georgia, and has a different perspective on the relative importance of this event than Harold Meyerson does.
As for the (admittedly, more prosaic dimension of) American politics his observations lead me to believe that I'm right about how this will play out among the conservatives --- and how it will affect the perpetually reactive Democrats.
For instance:
What does the future hold for Georgia?
On a personal level, the response to Soviet rule was to create resignation and apathy, and people had a lack of confidence in themselves and assumed that they couldn't change things. The Rose Revolution changed that a lot, [but now] I think people have lost that new confidence. There's tremendous bitterness against the United States, ranging from the top of the government to the most ordinary people. It's sad, because we warned against this adventure, but there's a universal belief that the United States betrayed Georgia, so you have people who are really in despair and profoundly hopeless. We've lost 70 percent of our influence in the Caucasus in four days. The future is very dark, I think, unless either the Georgian public or the American government becomes much, much more serious and tries to retrieve the situation. That can happen, but one can't bet on it.
That sense of betrayal is going to be used by the neocons as a rallying cry for their revitalized cold war cause. And they will be agitating and pushing the debate and coercing anyone who disagrees on the basis of a myth that the US abandoned a Democratic ally because it refused to confront an evil enemy. It's their most successful theme.
I fully expect to see a Committee To Liberate Georgia and a Washington Lobby formed by this time next year with a full blown push for a Georgia Liberation Act following not far behind. (I suspect they will also hope that an Obama administration will be too smart or too practical not to do what they want, the better to gain domestic political leverage as they refurbish the conservative image.)
The neocons and their hawkish buddies are not like other people. They don't learn from their errors or make any changes in strategy due to facts or experience or even embarrassment. They just keep repeating themselves over and over and over again, decade after decade, without any acknowledgment of their failures, simply changing the rhetoric to represent a different country on the Risk board. Indeed, that may be the whole point. Conservative hawks, in one form or another, have managed to dominate American foreign policy ever since WWII, in both the presidency and as a political constituency in Washington. They do it through red-baiting, race-baiting and chauvinistic appeals to demaaahcracy 'n freedom. It's been tough for them lately, with Iraq being an epic cock-up and Iran just not being a worthy adversary for a superpower. Terrorism doesn't fit their worldview. A resumption of the cold war, however, would be a return to their glory days. The Democrats would be fools not to be prepared this time.
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