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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Keeping an Eye Out for Georgia

by Joshua Foust

The International Crisis Group just released a new study on Georgia: All sides in the conflict – Georgian, Russian and South Ossetian – committed war-time abuses, but the actions of Ossetian militias, who systematically looted, torched and in some cases bulldozed most ethnic Georgian villages, were particularly egregious. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of [...]

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Keeping Up With Georgia, Or the Problems with Revolution Fatigue

by Joshua Foust

There is plenty of commentary on Iran out there. You don’t need us to fill you in (though we might try a bit later, from an altitude above the twitter-RTing that’s currently 90% of the “news” about the “revolution”). What I do find remarkable about what’s going on right now remains what’s going on in [...]

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Iran Isn’t the Only Country Rioting

by Joshua Foust

While all the focus is on Iran’s street riots over a possibly-rigged election, let us turn our attention to U.S. ally The Republic of Georgia. Georgia, if you recall, was embroiled in a nasty little border war with Russia this past August, and was pretty successful in pinning much of the blame on Russia’s “aggression.” [...]

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Chisinau, Tbilisi, The Masseuse & Her Blog

by Nathan Hamm

Plenty of well-deserved attention is being paid to the goings-on on in Moldova. (I recommend the fantastic Scraps of Moscow for plenty of news and analysis on the situation.) Meanwhile, the conflict between the opposition and the government continues to simmer in Georgia. Considering the ways in which storming the halls of power seems to [...]

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Remember that whole Russia-Georgia thing?

by Joshua Foust

I still don’t get the strategic calculus behind this one: The United States and Georgia officially became “strategic partners” under a charter signed by the two governments on January 9. While Georgian officials are hailing the document as a guarantee of Washington’s support for Tbilisi, analysts are divided on what kind of impact the agreement [...]

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Questioning Georgia

by Joshua Foust

Remember when I said Mark Ames was being too hard on CJ Chivers over his coverage of the Georgian conflict? Well. Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and [...]

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Georgia Is No Lamb, but Neither Are Journalists

by Joshua Foust

Mark Ames—yes, the same guy who used to run the much-lamented Exile—has something to say about how the media covered the Russo-Georgian war of last August. The real question, then, is why the Times waited until this late to question its own position–why wait until the war was long off the front pages, to publish [...]

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The Other Side of Georgia

by Joshua Foust

Robert English has an historical perspective on Georgia: Large rallies in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi denounced the Abkhazians and Ossetians as “traitors” and “pawns of the Kremlin” while groups of angry Georgians took their protests directly to the Abkhazian and Ossetian capitals of Sukhumi and Tskhinvali. The resulting confrontations often turned violent. A 1989 [...]

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Georgia’s Side

by Joshua Foust

C.J. Chivers presents Georgia’s side of “what went wrong.” Georgia has released intercepted telephone calls purporting to show that part of a Russian armored regiment crossed into the separatist enclave of South Ossetia nearly a full day before Georgia’s attack on the capital, Tskhinvali, late on Aug. 7. Georgia is trying to counter accusations that [...]

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