The Self-Importance of Self-Criticism

Perhaps because of the Great Recession, or as an inevitable consequence of globalisation's long-term restructuring of every aspect of our lives (when, as Marx once put it, "all that is solid melts into air"), it has become fashionable to suggest that the university system in the United States is due for a fundamental re-structuring. Most of the animus seems to be directed at humanities education as increasingly "useless" and "irrelevant" in an economic climate where tenured faculty positions are fast disappearing. On the external side, the argument (put forth with some force a few years ago by Thomas Friedman) that the U.S. lags behind Asia in scientific education is a valid policy concern. But it is the internal criticism that has been gathering steam: by this I mean academics turning an introspective, self-critical look on their profession and its limitations for the future.

The most high-profile shot across the bow was fired by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in his recent New York Times op-ed entitled (provocatively enough) "End the University as We Know It."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

To those of us thinking about an academic career, some of his arguments are all too familiar. He correctly notes the oversupply of underpaid, debt-ridden graduate students vying for jobs that do not exist. His attacks of the tenure system and increasing specialisation (which means that young scholars produce, in Taylor's view, obscure books that do not sell) are entering dodgy territory. His solutions, especially his thematic interdisciplinary re-organisation of educational institutions around problem areas like "Water" are in the domain of the fantastic. Though Taylor gets points for creativity, his proposed system would eliminate the opportunity to specialise in a particular discipline that lies at the very basis of interdisciplinarity. A scholar not properly and rigorously trained in history and anthropology can have little to add to a colleague in the mathematics or physical sciences. If everyone is a bit of a poet and a bit of a biologist, they end up being nothing much at all.

It would be easy to take the route of defending humanities education by pointing to the intrinsic worth of "developing the mind," or stressing the transferrability of "critical thinking" skills to the business or policy domain. But this would be a cop-out precisely because it entails a complete surrender to the argument that humanities are useless, by making them either a "Chicken soup for the soul" that cannot be taken seriously in an environment of difficult budget choices, or admitting that the only way a humanities major can be useful is by taking a job in government or business.
Taylor and other critics have named the problem: the humanities do not engage with the wider social world. But the pressure to change should not only be on universities. Why not demand that policymakers, businessmen and NGOs pay greater attention to those obscure books that do not sell? Would not our foreign policy, for instance, be different if people in Washington read less popular histories and simplified security reports and engaged instead with serious in-depth studies of the people of a region (like the Middle East or South Asia)? But the process of translation is tricky. The world of academic writing requires a sense of open-endedness and refusal to prescribe, while the world of policy calls for immediate action. There is a window for dialogue, but historians and anthropologists must be left alone to do their job as observers of our complex world, not transformed into task-oriented bureaucrats.

To return to the crisis of academia, in an even more introspective critique known to many students currently applying to graduate school, Prof. William Pannapacker writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education with some categorical advice: "Just Don't Go."

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm

This is an impassioned plea that is much easier to accept because it is written to help save thousands of unfortunate souls from a life of misery. Once again, much of what Pannapacker says is absolutely spot-on, particularly his astute observation that many students who go to graduate school do so because of esoteric concerns like their "special interest" and "love" for a subject, their refusal to venture out into the real world, their need for validation, their romanticism of scholarly life, and the limits to their skills. His assessment of the declining number of secure jobs and the massive competition that results (thousands of applicants for one position amounting to nothing more than a lottery) is sobering and realistic. His solution is far simpler than Taylor's: unless you have an independent source of income or reliable connection, don't get a PhD.

The problem with all these criticisms is their exaggerated self-importance. Pannapacker is doing precisely what he accuses his naive graduate students of doing: making an emotional argument based on idealistic, insider notions about what academia is. Teaching at a university is simply a job like any other. Garbagemen, foresters, baristas, taxi drivers and call centre operators do not go around on the Internet posting long-winded diatribes about the state of their profession. Those of us who are going into academia certainly need to be, and are being, made aware of the enormous financial and lifestyle risks of such a choice. But we should understand that there are many jobs that are far worse and far less economically secure in a service-based economy. Farmers, manufacturers or people without college degrees in the United States are in an arguably worse position, not to mention everyone in the developing world trying to scrape a living for their families by diversification, immigration and other means. The trials and tribulations of an unemployed PhD. are painful but not catastrophic. Taylor and Pannapacker grew up in an age when academics enjoyed a comparatively more important social position, and their expectations for the profession (as well as their assumptions of students' expectations) reflect this. The future generation of academics already knows better.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

As I rapidly approach the end of my undergraduate education, I look back at what I've accomplished academically in four years at Berkeley and I am tempted to conclude that it's all been rather mundane: semester followed by semester in an indistinguishable haze of half-completed readings, "winged" finals and papers, and beer-soaked celebrations.

There were, however, moments of genuine clarity and learning, when my perspective on the world shifted and I could suddenly think in a new way about a certain subject. I've thought of five assigned readings from my classes so far that have been able to accomplish this, in however small a measure. I do not include the many fascinating books and articles I've read for research or outside interest inspired by my studies, which would be far too many.


1) Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). Read for Letters & Science 40: The Soviet Experience, Prof. Irina Paperno (Spring 2006).
This collection of diaries is a remarkable insight into the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens living during the years of Stalin's Terror. What is most surprising about these fragments of memory is how much the official ideologies of the state were a living force in people's daily lives. The most shocking example is that of Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, a student who earnestly tries to become the "new man" and struggles through some unsuccessful attempts at getting a girl. In his clumsy yet charming words the glorious visions of Stalinist propaganda meet the banal facets of everyday life.


2) Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999). Read for History 114B: Modern South Asia, Prof. Eugene Irschick (Fall 2007).
Indian women have been traditionally conceptualised by the West either as hopelessly sensuous and sexual or as repressed and traditional, in a perverse dichotomy borne of a heady brew of Orientalist, colonial, patriarchal and other nasty discourses. Puri's work is based on actual interviews with contemporary women, talking about their sexual lives and the challenges they face, from pleasing their husbands to understanding what it means to be an "Indian" woman in the 21st century.


3) Violent Environments. Ed. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (Cornell University Press, 2001). Selections read for ESPM 168: Political Ecology, Prof. Nancy Peluso (Spring 2008).
This collection of essays takes on dominant assumptions of environmentalist thinking, by debunking the idea of natural scarcity as a driver of conflict and challenging the violence of capitalist enclosures and conservation measures. Perhaps the most interesting piece is by James McCarthy, who does something completely unique in academia: applies the analytical tools of political ecology, normally used to defend local resource control by Third World indigenous peoples against big bad Western environmentalists, to the First World case of the Wise Use movement in North America.


4) Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Political Life (Knopf, 2007). Read for Public Policy 103: Wealth & Poverty, Prof. Robert Reich (Spring 2008).
The main reason why this book makes the list is that having Reich as a Professor is one of the small yet incredibly rewarding perks of being a Berkeley student. What he says is not particularly original or controversial, but he has been able to express in clear language some basic truths of our age: that the economy has undergone a fundamental shift in the last thirty years so that I am now a "symbolic analyst," that corporations have no morality, and that we all have choices to make as consumers and citizens. The fact that I was taking Reich's class in the year of Obama's election and the beginning of the economic crisis makes it that much more of a timely and unforgettable read.


5) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005). Read for History 280U: Histories of the British Empire, Profs. Thomas Metcalf and James Vernon (Fall 2008).
Since I only read the first chapter, I hesitated to include it on this list. But Cooper touches on what is perhaps the most important concern animating my current scholarly interests: the tension between resisting the modernity of colonialism and the fact that colonised people often appealed to "Western" or "Enlightenment" notions of rights, citizenship and justice to make claims. Cooper uses the example of West Africa under French rule, but similar arguments have been made by Indian historians like Sumit Sarkar who have been very inspirational to me outside of my undergraduate curriculum.

Democracy and Popular Protest in India

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last month's attacks in Mumbai was not the sudden realisation by many in the West that India, as the world's largest democracy, was an ally worth standing by far more so than our friend for so many decades, Pakistan. There are serious questions on a large geo-political scale that need asking, but they are part of the ebb and flow of statecraft in South Asia and will not find easy answers soon.

No, what is downright amazing is a less-reported story that, following a wave of popular protests over the handling of the attacks by the Indian government, the Home Minister and national security adviser resigned. The BBC says "hundreds of people took to the streets" in a show of demanding accountability for the government's failure to protect its citizens:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7757122.stm

Reading this story from the U.S., where the parallel with 9/11 has been pushed repeatedly by an unimaginative media, one is struck by the incongruity of such a response: after all, when their country was attacked, why did Indians not rally around their leaders and give Manmohan Singh a 90% approval rating, as George W. Bush was honoured seven years ago? The answer lies, shockingly for Westerners accustomed to believing that their variant of "democracy" is the highest stage of political development, in the truly substantive nature of Indian democracy. The Indian public sphere is not content to shore up the establishment in a show of good faith and solidarity, as the docile and ill-informed American public did. No, the supposedly flawed and backward Indian democracy produced a textbook response to the failure of its government. Where were the masses of people in the streets demanding to know what the Bush administration knew, and did, about terrorism in the year before 9/11? Why was that infamous P.D.B. of August 2001 entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S." not burned in effigy by angry mobs on the streets of New York, Cleveland, and Omaha? And why, if Bush and his national security team presided over the most devastating attack on American soil in history, were they furthermore given carte blanche on their judgment in starting a war?

The answer lies in different traditions of democracy in the U.S. and India, indeed in the differential basis of the nation-state. The U.S. government is an entrenched and hegemonic apparatus that presides over an apathetic and generally politically uninvolved consumer society. In India, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly pointed out in a recent essay entitled "'In the Name of Politics': Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India," traditions of popular protest by workers, peasants, and other marginalised groups survive from the early 20th-century struggles of the independence movement to challenge the nation-state. Nehru was opposed to any kind of "unrest," believing it to be incompatible with a "civilised" and mature democracy (where tamer forms of accountability like petitions and the ballot box should prevail). Of course, what the nationalist elites continually failed to understand about the character of the Indian nation was the vast spectrum of minority interests found within it that could not be cajoled, appeased, or integrated without a painful process of adjustment (in other words, that hegemony was hard to come by). In all, this adds up not to a backward and unruly system but to a rich, vibrant, and relevant sense of democracy in India, which should give skeptics about India's future at least some consolation in these dark times.

Stalin in Lipstick

Sarah Palin's folksiness is viewed by right-wing demagogues as being somehow natural, down-home and in touch with "Joe Six-Pack." Leaving aside this shameless exhibition of cheap populism and the unproven connection between how folksy you are and how qualified you are to be Vice-President of the United States (and quite possibly President), there is a sharper edge to the Palin persona than most observers will allow.

For every attempt to construct yourself as a small-town hockey mom involves the Othering of something else, in this case the vague image of the East Coast liberal elite. This is an old trope in American politics, as old as John Adams being portrayed as an aloof British royalist in contrast with Jefferson as the farmer. We need to look no further than the Folkster-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush, playing this game against the wind-surfing, French-loving, swiss cheese-eating John Kerry, who never stood a chance.

But the situation is fundamentally different four years later. Bush and Kerry were essentially the same: both patrician politicians from New England who went to Yale. Bush, scion of an American political dynasty, was cynically and hypocritically deploying a discourse of simplicity that Karl Rove had taught him. Palin, by contrast, is the Real Thing. She really does come from a small town, and one as peripheral to the nation's centres of power (Washington and New York) as you can possibly get. She really wants to bring some "Wasilla Main Street" spirit to the cocktail-party crowd, gosh darn it.

Here's where the Republican Party's ideology comes out from underneath all the political games and rears its ugly, ugly head. Rudy Giuliani's deplorable RNC speech included this remarkable statement: "I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough." The use of the word cosmopolitan reveals, at long last, the Other the Republicans are attacking. It has both a cultural aspect (multiculturalism and the valuation of difference) and a spatial aspect (small towns vs. big cities), and I would go so far as to say that it's the organising principle of the Republican vision of America.

What does this sound like? Surprisingly, another set of ideologues constructed "cosmopolitanism" as their main enemy a long time ago...they were the Leninist-Stalinists. Consider this call to action from a 1949 article by one F. Chernov: "Bourgeois cosmopolitanism is chiefly aimed against patriotism. Therefore the goal of further education, development and cultivation of Soviet patriotism demands a resolute struggle against cosmopolitanism and absolute victory over such disgraceful vestiges of bourgeois ideology as cringing and servility towards the capitalist West." Anyone who lived in the Soviet bloc is familiar with this language, which did the same rhetorical work as the Giuliani-Palin discourse. The "rootless" big-city bourgeois interests (which often included familiar Others like the Jews) were pitted against the Soviet village full of patriotic peasants. Of course Soviet policies, which destroyed the Russian peasantry, were no better for the village than the Republicans' big business-friendly policies are for "Main Street." But that was never the point. The Soviet and Republican ideologies are not mere abstractions; both Palin and Stalin (who also hailed from a small town at the outskirts of the Russian Empire, in this case Georgia) believe every doggone word they say.

The attack on cosmopolitanism is at the heart of any attempt to build the kind of ignorant patriotism that allows a small band of poorly educated, mediocre bureaucrats to enslave a great nation and its people. This is what Stalin did, and this is what the Republicans are doing. What comes out of big cities and universities (freedom of expression in culture and the arts, intelligent political criticism) always threatens this project. This is why "Professor Obama" can't be President. The only acceptable leadership figures are truly mediocre bureaucrats like the mayor of Wasilla who not only exhibit but celebrate their mediocrity.
Stalin was a man of extremely limited intellectual capacity and brutish cultural taste. One need only compare the kind of literature he promoted, which came to be known as "Soviet realism," with Sarah Palin saying that her favourite author is a columnist for Runner's World Magazine and her inquiry about banning books at the Wasilla Library, to realise the danger we are in. Stalin, an embodiment of mediocrity, ended up ruling the country of Tolstoy and Chaikovsky. Palin could very well end up running a country as rich in culture and intellectual diversity as America, which has the best universities and the most Nobel Prize winners in the world. This simply cannot happen.

It's time to embrace cosmopolitanism and difference as the best way to resist the tyranny of mediocrity. It's time to stop eating Palin's bullshit, excuse me mooseshit, by the spoonful.

Eagleton's Manifesto

Feel how you like about Terry Eagleton and his politics: the man has the unique talent to cut with razor-sharp language. They are precision cuts, even paper cuts that get under the skin of his intellectual opponents, who often find themselves unable to muster replies of comparable clarity. I have to say at the outset, I do not agree with Eagleton's far-too-orthodox-for-the-21st-century Marxist programme, but his critiques must be not only addressed, but embraced, by those of us who care about post-colonialism and theories of resistance.

His stone-cold brilliant essay on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, entitled "In the Gaudy Supermarket," is the single most important piece on the use of language in contemporary thought since George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." It should be more than that: a manifesto for the academic, the polemicist, and anyone interested in promoting a critical view of the world. The link to the whole thing is here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html

and though it is worth a careful read, all one really needs to quote to get the point across is this wonderful opening salvo:


"The second rule of this samizdat handbook reads: ‘Be as obscurantist as you can decently get away with.’ Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonising about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible. You do not need to hail from a shanty town to find a Spivakian metaphorical muddle like ‘many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism’ pretentiously opaque. It is hard to see how anyone can write like this and admire the luminous writings of, say, Freud. Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. Radical academics, one might have naively imagined, have a certain political responsibility to ensure that their ideas win an audience outside senior common rooms. In US academia, however, such popularising or plumpes Denken is unlikely to win you much in the way of posh chairs and prestigious awards, so that left-wingers like Spivak, for all their stock-in-trade scorn for academia, can churn out writing far more inaccessible to the public than the literary élitists who so heartily despise them."



Any college undergraduate can sympathise with the quotes he chooses from Spivak (they are only infinitesimally more comprehensible when in context), having encountered such "drivel" many times in their education. But what is at stake is not by any means the desire to simplify complex matters for the sake of understanding. On the contrary, Eagleton argues, there is something profoundly pernicious about this kind of hyper-language because it conceals fairly modest and muddled politics. What kind of resistance can this inspire? What kind of intellectual clarity will this provide to someone mired in Enlightenment assumptions and all the other post-colonial bogeys? The tragic thing about Spivak and the hundreds of critics in her wake is that they make post-colonial thought, which is at heart a remarkably incisive body of knowledge, into something obscure and unappealing. Even Foucault, buried underneath the impossible sentence formation of his rather clumsy French, has a certain impishness and instability that can captivate the reader. Most of the post-Saidian academic world in the US and UK is dry as dust by comparison. So what if their politics are modest? To me it seems such politics are preferable to Eagleton's Marxism. But not if they are served to the world as cold porridge and serve to inspire in students looking for alternatives to the dominant discourses an overwhelming feeling of "meh."

Even bona fide revolutionary heroes, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose book Empire was a global best-seller in 2000 and advocated a comprehensive, original worldview of our globalised world, fall prey to this. Their politics are the very opposite of modest; their language is the stilted jargon of post-colonialism's muddy waters. Consider this:
"Precisely by bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics of the biopolitical context that we have described up to this point, and leading them back to the ontology of production, we will be able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body, which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical."
Needless to say it's a far cry from "Workers of the world, unite," and raises the question as to whom is this work even meant to speak? Certainly not the multitude, whose spontaneous acts of resistance, from the LA riots to the World Social Forum, are grounded in much more prosaic concerns than, "How contradictory is the collective biopolitical body?" The audience is more likely a coterie of Western academics who have accumulated enough to immerse themselves in Foucault and Deleuze at their leisure, and a marginalised group of radical activists who form as far from a "multitude" as conceivable. Indeed, Hardt and Negri's attempts to provide Marx-like imagery, as in their modification of his working-class-as-mole metaphor to resistance-as-a-snake, are pale imitations and do not burn with the urgency of now. Marx and Engels's manifesto required nothing from its readers than an observant eye to the realities of the world, and their language reflected this (thus, the notion of the expanding bourgeoisie was not just a nice turn of phrase but described a tangible process raging all around). For whatever their ideas were worth, they were expressed in a uniquely purposeful language (Eagleton uses Freud as an example, who also fits this description).

The way to inspire resistance, both as critical inquiry within academia and as political activism, is to use metaphors that are fiery and earthy, not airy and watery. This means they have to be urgent and contextually grounded, not abstract or muddled. The post-Foucauldian concern with the body is a perfect example of how a valuable perspective can be lost. When the body became a mere "site of resistance" or "vehicle of power" and theorists stopped talking about the body, materiality was lost and we came down the winding road to Hardt and Negri's generally superficial references to the "biopolitical." This confuses and turns off even the most well-meaning students, even those with an understanding of Foucault (perhaps especially them).

Critics have responded to Eagleton's attack in a predictably dull fashion. Judith Butler complained that Eagleton doesn't get how much Spivak's work has "inspired" all sorts of activists around the world. To which the rejoinder would question how much of Spivak they really understood, what they actually did with this theory, and whether they're succeeding. Not to mention how much more inspired they could have been with clearer prose. These are simple considerations, perhaps below Butler and the academic establishment's wide horizon. But Occam is due for a comeback sometime this century. Perhaps the most inspiring thing Spivak ever produced is not her venerable body of obscurantist text but her charitable foundation promoting literacy in India. And perhaps post-colonial theory needs re-directing to that most simple concept of all, the American grammar school's number one rule of writing: show, not tell.

Review: The Passion Of Christopher Hitchens

It is probably impossible to "objectively" review Hitchens's latest and most bristling book-length polemic, entitled God Is Not Great. Either you flat out accept the assumption that Hitchens rejects -that there is a God (in the case of his most vehement American critics, add "and His Son is Jesus")- in which case you are simply arguing past him, or you agree and can throw up your hands in the air with self-satisfaction, secure in your "secular humanism." There are massive problems with his argument for the return of the Enlightenment, and with his adulation of scientific progress (an equally angry book could very well be written about the monstrous injustices of science, from eugenics to the Atom bomb). What is difficult to challenge honestly are his attacks against superstition, fundamentalism, and the inherent hypocrisy of all sycophantic belief.

Hitchens is trapped, however, by his newfound neo-con posturing. In some ways he appears to be consistent: he deplores the whole of Christianity as much as he does the whole of Islam, and has no room for nuance. But when challenged, as he was by Bill Maher on television, to comment on the disturbing Protestantism animating George W. Bush, he cannot throw his friends on the bus. No, Hitch says, Bush is not actually religious, and his conversion from alcoholism was not due to Jesus but to threats from his missus (this said on no evidence whatsoever). He wouldn't even comment on whether Karl Rove was an atheist or not (Rove claims he is). He also ludicrously insisted on referring to this sleazy charlatan as "Dr. Rove" (imagine Hitch's snide huffing and puffing if one gave honorifics to some of his favourite targets like Mother Teresa and Kissinger). The assumption that people, especially those one happens to agree with, are "secretly" humanists and only outwardly religious does a huge disservice to Hitchens's otherwise worthy attack on religion. Bush's faith is real enough, and drove him headlong into the Iraq War. Religion is that much more dangerous than Hitchens would have it because it is more deeply rooted than even Hitchens thinks.

Finally, Hitchens's love for America and its tradition of separation of church and state (he constantly returns to his heroes Paine and Jefferson) grossly misunderstands the reality of religion in America. Yes, the U.S. has never had an official church, and the Jeffersonian position on religion is an example the rest of the world should emulate. But for a country that is upwards of 80% Christian (Hitchens claims, again on little evidence, that people lie to pollsters and spend their Sundays drinking martinis, thus putting the problem out of sight, out of mind), and where presidential candidates have to appear at a ridiculous forum with a bearded gnome asking them questions that sound an awful lot like the religious tests the Constitution forbids, the problem is very real indeed. Perhaps Europe, where much to Hitchens's dismay citizens have to pay taxes for an established church but where belief levels have fallen dramatically, is a better example to follow. In America, unofficial religion rages ever stronger, while in Europe organised Christianity is dying (Islam is another problem altogether). Perhaps this "neutering" of religion's deleterious influence on society is a better way forward than simply saying it's not the government's business and letting it spread privately. Better an irrelevant Pope than a relevant Rick Warren.

Saakashvilli's Gamble, Or We Are Not All Georgians Now

There is an odd sense of deja vu about the Russia-Georgia War that takes us back not ten years to the obscure Balkan violence of Bosnia and Kosovo but twenty years to the Era of Big Statements, to Afghanistan, "Evil Empire," and "tearing down this wall." The phrase "Cold War" is on everyone's lips, and in the West the old rhetoric has been dutifully dusted off by sanctimonious warriors like John McCain, who declared, echoing the post-9/11 solidarity other nations expressed towards America, "We are all Georgians now." This is patently disingenuous, since McCain, Bush and the U.S. military have no intention and no way of defending Georgia with anything more than words.

Of course we should all be concerned about Russia, and no one likes Putin's authoritarian streak and the revival of Red Square parades. But this is not about Putin or Russia, who has been playing its hand in a familiar scenario on its borders for a long time now. The story is Saakashvili's gamble and the hapless role the United States played in this foreign policy trainwreck. The article below, by a Moscow-based correspondent for the Atlantic, lays it out with startling clarity:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200808u/georgia-russia-war

This war is, to boil it down to the very essentials, about a very old piece of shrewd realpolitik. Stalin's redrawing of boundaries to include disparate ethnic minorities (like importing Russians into Moldova and, in this case, separating Ossetia into two provinces, one inside Georgia and the other inside Russia) ensured that nationalist aspirations would always stumble on internal conflicts. The situation on the eve of this war-du-jour was like that in many other places: a tense stand-off between the Russophile Ossetes and Abkhaz and a brash, ambitious and Western-backed Georgian leader. This prophetic travel journal from a Slate correspondent only a few months ago gives an impression of what life was like before the tanks started rolling in:

http://www.slate.com/id/2197134/entry/2191589/

Saakashvili, whose human rights record has been unimpressive since the Rose Revolution swept him into power in 2003, ostensibly as a beacon of freedom in a lawless region, was emboldened by the Americans' rhetoric of promoting democracy etc. He gladly committed Georgian troops to assist in the invasion of Iraq (an irony that makes Russian propagandists salivate) and expected a commitment in return. Not McCain's vacuous pronouncements or humanitarian aid, but concrete help, a NATO bid and commitment from the West to keep the Russians at bay. When he finally moved for endgame and attacked, he was bitterly surprised to find that he had been let down and lashed out at his erstwhile American friends. Where were they now, when it counted, he wondered as his country burned.

I have a humble suggestion for Saakashvili and for others like him, trying to walk the tightrope of 21st-century geopolitics. They should watch a small film that came out of Romania in 2007 to win a prize at Cannes. California Dreamin' tells the story of a group of American soldiers on their way to Kosovo who are stopped in a small Romanian village in the middle of nowhere. At once the locals try to use the Americans to their benefit: the workers go on strike, the mayor wants to befriend them as leverage against a corrupt gangster, and everyone remembers how, for 50 years, the Americans were always going to "come and save us," from the Nazis, the Russians, and from themselves. Better late than never, right? But all the Americans are interested in is passing through, and they do so as soon as they can, leaving behind the villagers to tear each other apart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG21tT2eE2w

The lesson is not easy to follow, and Bush/McCain's assurances were all too tempting for Saakashvili. What we are left with is a ruined country, a bellicose and unstable Russia, thousands of deaths, and the same tired, hollow threats and promises.