Georgia

A Dishonest Commentary on Georgia and Russia

by Joshua Foust

Heritage scholar James Jay Carafano endorses the Georgia propaganda film “5 Days of War.” The film ends with testimonies from Georgians who lost family members in the war. “After I met a lot of refugees,” Harlin said last night during a post-screening discussion of the movie at Washington’s Landmark Theater, “I felt I had to [...]

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A Bitter War, with No Heroes

by Joshua Foust
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Today marks the third anniversary of the Russo-Georgian War. Georgia has a famously fraught relationship with its two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since before its independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia had fought with the two, even sending a militia into Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, in 1989, which was later put down [...]

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Trying to Unravel the Tblisi Blast

by Joshua Foust

One administration official told The Washington Times there was “no consensus” on responsibility for the Tbilisi blast. Really, that was the one line that leapt out at me in this piece. As Eli Lake reports, it is indeed significant that Secretary Clinton has raised the issue with her Russian counterparts two times since the September [...]

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Pick One

by Joshua Foust

Over at The Weekly Standard, Daniel Halper writes: But this allegation, coming as it did from a U.S. ally, was immediately dismissed by those on the far right and far left in Washington (who oddly share a mutual affinity for Vladimir Putin’s thugocracy, or maybe just an affinity for the Obama administration’s great power politics [...]

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Did a Russian Terrorist Really Blow Up the American Embassy in Tblisi?

by Joshua Foust
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Eli Lake dropped a bombshell in the Washington Time this morning: A bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Tblisi, Georgia, in September was traced to a plot run by a Russian military intelligence officer, according to an investigation by the Georgian Interior Ministry. Shota Utiashvili, the most senior official in charge of intelligence analysis [...]

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Chart of the Day

by Joshua Foust
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An Arab Spring That Wasn’t

by Joshua Foust

Puzzling story in Time about the mild protests in Georgia over the last week: An Uprising in the Caucasus, but No Arab Spring in Georgia By Thursday afternoon, it was hard to recognize the voice of Nino Burjanadze, the Georgian opposition leader, who normally speaks as though she has a bullhorn built into her throat. [...]

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The EU’s Georgia War Report

by Joshua Foust
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About a month ago, I noted in the Columbia Journalism Review that Georgia had devoted a rather significant amount of resources toward pressing its case—in English!—as a hapless victim of Russian aggression. To a large degree, the EU report on the Russo-Georgian War of last August pokes holes in the myth of Georgian victimization, mostly [...]

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The Meta-War in Georgia, One Year On

by Joshua Foust
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I have a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review today, looking at how the media is covering the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War of last year. A brief snippet: That doesn’t mean the meta-war over Georgia and Russia has ended. It is to say that Georgia has a big advantage in the English-language press [...]

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Georgia Publicly Debates Its Future

by Joshua Foust

Irakli Alasania, the leader of the Our Georgia-Free Democrats party, has quite an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: Most people will be familiar with the threat Georgia faces from its Russian neighbor. But Georgian society also faces massive internal challenges to its democracy and economy. We need to get past our confrontational politics [...]

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Michael Cecire on Moral Equivalence

by Joshua Foust

Michael J. Totten—remember him?—has a guest author, a former PCV no less, discussing the recent rioting in Georgia. The events swirling within Iran have been nothing short of startling, taking the world by surprise by its speed and intensity. Perhaps it’s testament to the Army of Davids globalization schema that, for weeks, the top two [...]

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