Mark Ames has an interesting article in today's Nation on the Georgian conflict. While for the most part, Ames is more interested in scoring domestic politics points (as is his right--the Nation is a domestic political magazine) than analyzing Russian geopolitics, he hits on a point under-emphasized in America coverage of the conflict: Georgia is running an efficient American influence operation. As Ames details, the invasion was prepped by an aggressive drive towards economic and political elites to convince them of the rightness of Georgia's action. Georgia also has high-placed lobbyists are also active in American politics, most notably McCain advisor Randy Scheunemann. Playing on deep-set American Russophobia, Georgians reaped favorable newspaper coverage portraying Russia's action as a savage, unprovoked attack by a bunch of rampaging Cossacks. Predictably, the Washington Post used the most bellicose language. Unfortunately for Georgia, its information operation conquered the chattering classes but did not convince decisionmakers to exert pressure, military or otherwise, to halt the Russian advance.
This is not a new problem. Foreign special interest groups have long manipulated and distorted information to convince American audiences to support their causes, filling the Washington D.C. cocktail circuit with legions of educated press flacks each promoting a different band of “democratic freedom fighters.” Now, combatants in insurgencies such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Balkan wars, and most recently the 2006 invasion of Lebanon strive to manipulate the international media and public opinion. Palestinians have been caught attempting to provoke Israeli punitive operations for the benefit of waiting television cameras (Al-Dura case is good example of Palestinian info ops), the Serbs and Russians perpetrated a longstanding myth that the Bosnian Muslims shelled their own people and falsely blamed it on the Serbs, and the confidence man Ahmed Chalabi managed to fool the Washington establishment into relying on his Iraqi National Congress (INC) as the main source of information about Saddam’s Iraq. I'm not going to even go into the Walt/Mearsheimer dustup without a hazmat suit at the ready, but you get the idea.
As a country, we need to evince a stronger skepticism towards these actors, who most assuredly do not have American interests in mind. They are looking out for their own national interests, or as David Rieff notes about aid groups, their own institutional interests. As painful as Russia's devastation of Georgia is, it would have been worse for us if we had acceded to their request for NATO membership--the step pushed by their American sympathizers. We would have faced a ruinous war with Russia or the total discrediting of the NATO alliance and the collapse of our operations in Afghanistan. We are in era where we must think carefully about how we exercise our power--whether it is soft or hard.
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