Russia escalates war with Georgia

From the Daily Mail (via Dark Skies):

The Russian Defence Ministry claims to have sunk a Georgian warship which was attacking its navy ships in the Black Sea, according to Russian new agencies. The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying that Georgian missile patrol boats twice tried to attack Russian ships, which fired back and sank one of the Georgian vessels.

But Russian bombers still appeared to be shelling a military airport at Tbilisi. Cataclysmic Russian bombing has laid waste to major towns, including Tskhinvali and Gori with around 2,000 believed dead.

The New York Times states that Russian troops are advancing on Gori:

Russian tanks and troops moved through the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and advanced on the city of Gori in central Georgia on Sunday night, for the first time directly assaulting a Georgian city with ground forces after three days of heavy fighting, Georgian officials said.

Georgian tanks were dug into positions outside Gori and planning to defend the city, said Shota Utiashvili, an official in Georgia’s interior ministry. He said the city of Gori was coming under artillery and tank fire. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Note that Gori is in Georgia proper, not in South Ossetia or any other disputed territory.

Foreign Policy Passport says Russia is landing troops on Georgia’s coast:

Here’s the latest on this fast-moving conflict:

• A reported 1,500 civilians have been killed in the fighting, and Russian tanks continue to flow into South Ossetia. The Russians say they have taken Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, though Georgia claims its forces withdrew of their own accord
• Russian planes have bombed Gori, a Georgian city due south of Tskhinvali where eyewitnesses describe “scenes of panic“
• Georgia is calling for a ceasefire but also recalling all 2,000 of its troops from Iraq, with U.S. logistical help [UPDATE: Russia rejects a ceasefire]
• U.S. President George W. Bush said that Russia’s attacks on South Ossetia were a “dangerous escalation” of the conflict
• Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told Bush in a phone conversation that Russia’s aim was “forcing Georgia to accept peace“
• Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has left Beijing and is reportedly visiting North Ossetia
• Politico’s Ben Smith wonders if this is a “3 a.m. moment” for the U.S. presidential candidates

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that the situation is “nearing all-out war,” with Russia landing troops on Georgia’s Black Sea coast.

It’s probably too much to hope for that a sniper will get the war criminal Putin while he’s in Ossetia.

All this amounts to a massive escalation of the conflict. As I said yesterday, the West needs to get tough with Russia. It should stop Russia now, with threats of:

1. economic sanctions (the West could say it won’t trade with Russia, nor will it trade with any country that does, forcing them all to choose between the West and Russia)

2. use of air power to gain air superiority over Georgia

3. use of air power to destroy Russian armour formations on the ground

Regarding this last point, bear in mind that NATO’s air forces have until very recently been configured to destroy columns of Russian armour advancing across Germany. Now imagine if this Russian column was hit by a squadron of Tornadoes or Eurofighters armed with Brimstone missiles:

Google gets its geography wrong

This:

On a related note, a worried Georgia resident asks:

I live in georegia but i dont see rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should i be worrie

(via Slashdot)

Georgia orders ceasefire

Georgia orders its troops to cease firing, effectively admitting Russia has won:

Georgia has ordered its forces to cease fire, and offered to start talks with Russia over an end to hostilities in South Ossetia, Georgian officials say.

Russia said fighting was continuing, Interfax news agency reported. Earlier Georgia said its troops had pulled out of the breakaway region and that Russian forces were in control of its capital, Tskhinvali.

Whether the Russians will want to stop the war is another matter, of course. But I think it’s unlikely they will attempt to invade and control all of Georgia, since if they did they would face too much international pressure against them.

Franz Kafka’s lesbian porn collection

Franz Kafka, the famous writer and porn collector, has had his stash of dirty books revealed to the public for the first time. Apparently he was into bestiality and lesbian porn:

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

“Academics have pretended it did not exist,” Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.”

(via Boing Boing)

The West should support Georgia

Marko Hoare points out that South Ossetia, with its small population, isn’t comparable to Kosovo:

South Ossetia is, unlike the former ‘Republic of Serb Krajina’ in Croatia, a legitimate entity representing a genuine national minority, with a right to enjoy very extensive autonomy – which Tbilisi has offered it. But with an ethnic Ossetian population at the start of the 1990s of only about 65,000 and a total population of about 100,000, South Ossetia is more on the scale of a town or enclave than of a nation: its resident population is approximately one thirtieth the size of Kosova’s; smaller than the Muslim Bosniak population of Serbia’s Sanjak region or the Albanian population of Macedonia (neither of whose right to secede, incidentally, I would recognise); smaller than any European nation other than the mini-states of Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino. The ‘independence’ of this tiny region means, effectively, its annexation by Russia – which is, in effect, a process that is underway, and which the desperate Georgian offensive is attempting to halt. I have already explained at length why South Ossetia is in no way equivalent to Kosova, either in terms of its constitutional or legal status, or in terms of its actual credentials as a ‘nation’. ‘Self-determination’ does not mean the right of a former colonial power – in this case Russia – to annex enclaves in its former colonies.

One problem with this analysis is that the Ossetians actually want to be part of the Russian empire, which seems a bit silly to me. Maybe the best solution would be to let South Ossetia join Russia, let Georgia join NATO and the EU, pump lots of EU money into Georgia to help its economy, and then laugh at the foolish Ossetians who’ve chosen to live in Russia-style poverty and squalor. (That’s also my proposed solution to the Transnistria problem, by the way).

This is not a case of Moscow supporting the right of national majorities to secede – the Abkhaz have no majority, not even a plurality, in Abkhazia. Nor is it a case of Moscow supporting the right of autonomous entities of the former Soviet Union to secede – Moscow has extended the same support to the separatists of Transnistria, which enjoyed no autonomous status in the USSR, while denying the right to secede of the Chechen Republic. This is simply a case of naked Russian imperialist expansionism. It is Georgia which is fighting to establish its independence, and Georgia which deserves our support. Georgia is a staunch ally of the West; the third largest contributor of troops to the allied coalition in Iraq. A Russian defeat of Georgia would be a tremendous setback for the West’s credibility and moral standing; it would increase Russian control of our energy supplies and encourage further Russian acts of aggression in the former Soviet Union.

Hoare is right here, in that if the West doesn’t back Georgia, it will lose credibility. It will also lose out economically, because the proposed Nabucco pipeline which would make Europe less reliant on Russia for gas, goes through Georgia.

(via Samizdata)

South Ossetia Roundup #2

This is one of a series of periodical roundups of posts regarding the South Ossetian War between Russia and Georgia. If you have anything you’d like me to include, get in touch either in the comments to this article, or by email to cabalamat (at) googlemail (dot) com.

Alex Massie thinks it’s Georgia’s fault, even if that country does have a better human rights record than Russia:

Russia may have provoked this crisis, and one may be properly critical of, indeed deplore, many aspects of recent Russian policy in the Caucasus or the Ukraine, but the immediate responsibility for this crisis must be borne by Tbilisi. That Georgia  – despite recent crackdowns on the opposition – remains a more free country than Russia (according to Freedom House) doesn’t require us to immediately endorse their view of the situation.

But the Russians might be over-reacting anyway:

That said, if Russia does, as the Georgians claim it intends to, land troops on Georgia’s coastline then this would on the face of it, seem a clumsy over-reaction, transforming the conflict from the defence of Ossetians who want to be Russian into an aggressive war against Georgia. Moscow may not care about that, of course and, thinking it unlikely to receive much sympathy in the west anyway, may think it worthwhile to use a bigger stick than might be thought wise or necessary…

Massie also suggests that NATO was wise to refuse Georgia entry, and that would only have emboldened Saakashvili:

Russia has taken advantage of “western weakness” by responding to a Georgian offensive. Given that Saakashvili has been bold enough to send his troops into South Ossetia even though his determination to join NATO was thwarted last year, one can only assume that he would have been even bolder had his country joined the alliance. And if a Georgia vs Russia conflict is dangerous now, it scarcely bears thinking how much worse it might be if Georgia were a NATO member.

View from North Britain thinks there should be a referendum:

Perhaps the conflict can only be resolved by organising a UN organised referendum to the people of South Ossetia, with both Georgia and Russia promising to recognise the result. If the previous referendums are an indication then South Ossetia would be a free independent country.

However, both Russia and Georgia would be against this.

Georgia would lose territory and give impetus to two other autonomous regions in its borders Abkhazia and Adjara to follow the same route.

Russia would be concerned that an independent Ossetian state in the south, would ultimately lead to the loss of its region of North Ossetia wishing to join the new country. It would also give impetus to Chechnya and possibly other Caucaus regions to declare independence from Russia.

Meanwhile, the South Ossetians are caught in the crossfire between the war and politics of Georgia and Russia.

Doug Merrill is being evacuated from Tbilisi.

Lenin even-handedly says both countries share the blame:

There must have been widespread bemusement last night as newspapers dramatically announced that Russia had invaded Georgia. In fact, it’s a little bit more complicated than that, since Russian troops were already in South Ossetia as part of a fragile ‘peacekeeping’ coalition. The Russian government is (dishonestly) arguing that its actions are merely the extension of its peacekeeping remit, even as it strikes beyond South Ossetia’s borders. The headlines subtly changed, at any rate, to omit talk of an invasion. Even with that change, there seems to be an odd reluctance to acknowledge the weirdest fact about this: Georgia seems to have ‘invaded’ South Ossetia in a deliberate act of provocation, and – according to Reuters – are now attacking Ossetian separatists with jets and troops.

I’d agree that both countries have been far to ready and enthusiastic about using force; however I disagree with Lenin here:

One can only imagine that the pro-US Georgian leadership, which has , had some sort of assent from Washington before acting in this way. After all, if it truly intends to withdraw 1,000 of its troops from Iraq to attack the South Ossetian independence movement, I would expect they had to ask Bush nicely first.

I doubt if America knew of the Georgian action in advanced, or woulsd have approved if it had known. Possibly Georgia misread the signals it was getting from America.

Martin Wisse says the USA has come out on Georgia’s side:

Well, Bush’s big speech on the subject seems to confirm that the west has firmly chosen the Georgian side in the conflict and consistency of principle be damned.

Wisse disagrees with any Manichean narrative painting the Georgians as good guys and the Russians as baddies:

The conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia (not to mention Abkhazia, the other breakaway region) and Russia is complex and should not be reduced to some black and white schematic pitting good Georgians vs bad Russians, but that seems to be the spin being decided upon it by western media. So yestersday we had the CIA connected Jamestown Foundation talking about “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia“, ignoring that this time it was Georgia that unnecesarrily escalated the conflict. At the Guardian’s Comment is Free, it was Svante Cornell who got the opportunity to say it was all Russia’s fault while at Crooked Timber, as always a reliable weathervane for the sensible transatlantic academic/liberal blogosphere, it was Maria Farrell who did the same.

Part of the reason newspapers do this is in order to get a simple narrative where everything makes sense. Of course, in the real world things can’t always be reduced to such simplicity.

Nosemonkey looks at the geopolitics of the conflict, with lots of maps of gas pipelines, to support the theory that Georgia provoked Russia because it thought the West would back it:

Georgia, meanwhile, knowing her own strategic importance, seems merely to have overplayed her hand and acted too soon – perhaps assuming that her new Western partners (most of whom have funded the country’s existing pipelines via the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) would be quicker to protect their investment, perhaps assuming that Russia under Medvedev would be slower to act about such things than Russia under Putin.

I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about gas pipelines, and Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, in the coming days.

Political Betting has an overview of the Sunday papers, most of which feature the conflict on their front page.

Eugenics is nothing to be scared of

Clairwil has put up an interesting post about how education can alleviate the problems of the underclass. Most of it I more or less agree with, but I disagree with this:

Another thing we cannot choose is who gives birth. Much as it pains me, morons do have children. Unless we accept state control of our breeding which I sincerely hope will never happen, then that’s what we’re stuck with.

The problem is that stupid people who have children often have stupid children, because intelligence is largely inherited. Then these stupid children often end up being in the 20% of people at the bottom of society who are functionally illiterate. OK, many people who’re illiterate could be literate if the education system was better, but they’re still going to be a bit thick, and so they’re unlikely to be suitable to do work in the high technology sectors of industry that the Britidh economy is going to increasingly rely on.

So it seems to me that it could be very beneficial to society if the state did control, at least to some extent, human reproduction. (And in fact it does already, for example it says that people who are under 16 aren’t allowed to have sex, nor are people who are close kin allowed to marry each other. So if you’re in principle against laws that say who can reproduce and with whom, then to be consistent you would have to oppose all such laws.)

I’m talking about a very “light touch” form of state control here. I propose that the least intelligent 20% of the population be discouraged from breeding. I’m agnostic how we would define who falls in this category — maybe it could be an IQ test, or be determined by educational qualifications, or a simple test of basic literacy. Whatever scheme is used, one must bear in mind that people will try to game the system. (By the way, I’m not claiming that IQ tests are a particularly good way of measuring intelligence — I don’t think they are — but I do think they’d be good enough for our purpose.)

What sort of “discouragement” do I have in mind? For example, we could tell stupid women that getting pregnant will not get them a council house, nor would they get child benefit. Stronger discouragement, such as compulsory sterilisation, would be counter-productive since most people would find it morally repugnant.

As well as discouraging the least intelligent from breeding, the state could intervene at the top end too, by having a pool of sperm and egg donors, who would all be of high intelligence, in good mental and physical health, and not genetically prone to diseases. British people come in a wide variety of races, and we’d want our donors to reflect tihs diversity, so parents can have kids that look like they could be genetically theirs.

People who’re infertile would be able to make use of this pool, without cost, but so would the wider population too and it’s quite likely there would be significant take-up. After all, many parents have told me how clever their children are, but no-one has ever bragged to me about how stupid their kids are, so I conclude that many parents want to have clever kids. Come to think of it, no-one’s ever bragged to me about how ugly their kids are either, so we could put physical beauty on the list of desirable attributes for the sperm/egg donor scheme.

In fact, under this scheme, there’d be no reason to prevent/discourage the least intelligent 20% from having children — merely ones that carry their genes. And any two humans are 99.9% genetically identical anyway, so their children would carry 99.9% of their genes anyway.

Some might say this is an illiberal or right-wing policy. I disagree. Consider if someone is handicapped by being born into a poor family, so they don’t have a good chance in life; people on the political left would regard this as unfair and think that the state should remedy this by such measures as state-funded education, and in thre long term make sure every household has enough money to prevent social exclusion. Similarly, if someone is handicapped by being born with low intelligence, that person — through no fault of their own — will not have a good chance in life. To remedy this unfairness, doesn’t it make sense to make sure that as many as possible are born with a good intelligence?

As well as the fairness argument, there is also the efficiency one. Clever people are better for the economy. Were the steam turbine, the jet engine, the computer, or the world wide web invented by clever people or stupid people? Are Britain’s most productive workers characterised by cleverness or stupidity? These questions answer themselves. Most British people want Britain to be a successful and prosperous country (not least for reasons of self interest).

Oh and before anyone accuses me of being a fascist or a Nazi, neither Fascist Italy nor Nazi Germany had a program like I am describing, with these attributes:

1. non-coercive, i.e. no compulsory sterilisation

2. focussed on intelligence rather than on totemic attributes such as “looking Germanic” in the Nazi case

3. including a sperm/egg donation system open to the wider population so that all would-be parents could use it if they wished

UPDATE:

Unsurprisingly, there’s been some heated response to this article. Tim Worstall thinks my proposal is “absolutely foul“. Devil’s Kitchen, on the other hand, grudgingly takes my side:

However, repugnant though I find his ideas, Calabamat is actually more right than Timmy: whilst we all pay for the children born into this society, we have a stake in those children’s lives.

The Elusive Pimpernel, however, takes Tim’s side:

I agree completely with the anti-eugenics stance – it should not be for the state or any appointed body to determine who can and cannot have a child.

Some poor taste humour

Some poor taste (but very funny) humour: 16 years from now…

(via Liberal Conspiracy)

Scottish Roundup

The latest Scottish Roundup is up here.