11/18/08 – Tim Cavanaugh – The Scott Horton Show

I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller, I wish I had a girl in the bed, I recall, I wish I had a rabbit in the hat, but I'm back to 6'4".
I wish I was a little bit taller.
Alright y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is Tim Cavanaugh.
He's a columnist for Reason Magazine.
And he's now an official spokesman of some kind for a peace activist out of South Ossetia.
Set me straight on the details there, Tim.
First of all, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Good to be on the show.
Thanks.
Yeah, I'm a columnist at Reason with the LA Times until a couple of months ago.
Right now I'm representing a person named Lira Chobrobova, who is in South Ossetia.
She has an organization called the Association of South Ossetian Women for Democracy and Human Rights.
It's a non-government, non-affiliated organization that does peace work and has been doing peace activist type work and Georgian-Ossetian dialogue since about the 92 war.
There was a war in 91, 92, 93 between Georgia and this region called South Ossetia.
There's another region called Ossetia.
And this is a person who's been trying to facilitate dialogue at the civilian level between Georgians and Ossetians for many years and was fairly, I would say, nonplussed by the war that occurred in August, and particularly by the coverage that it got.
The reason that she has retained our company is that she was really shocked at the way the Georgian point of view, and particularly Mikhail Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, who's a friend of John McCain's, has many friends in Congress, and has a lot of boosters among the neocon media, had his side of the story become the only side that really got represented for quite some period during and after the war.
Indeed, it's been kind of interesting to see the media in the last week or two.
I guess this New York Times story came out a couple of weeks ago.
And now all of a sudden everybody's saying, oh wow, all of a sudden we realize how wrong we all were about that.
Yeah, it's been very interesting.
It's been a lot of work.
We have facts on our side.
I don't want to get into too much about who's right, who's wrong, what the rights of the Georgians are, whether the Russians were too tough in the way they went in, whether the Russians egged the Georgians on prior to it.
Our real concern is that there were people on the ground.
There were innocent civilians.
I know this sounds like a cliché, but I am not exaggerating.
Women and children who were wiped out by armed Georgian army government regulars, who were fed and clothed and paid for and equipped and trained by the United States, were in units that were organized along NATO principles and with NATO standards.
And that went on.
There were attacks against civilians, intentional attacks against civilians, other attacks against civilians that it's hard to imagine how they weren't intentional.
Use of cluster bombs, which are widely internationally banned, not by everybody.
We've seen a few instances of people being shot at point-blank ranges.
They were trying to flee the city.
Families in their cars who were fired on by armored columns, by individual soldiers.
One case where we had a husband, wife, and adult son all fleeing in their car.
The car gets smashed.
The wife is killed immediately.
The father and the son crawl into the woods because the father has been injured in the leg and can't walk.
The son gets shot and left for dead.
They're crawling into the forest trying to get away from soldiers who are blocking the road.
And the soldiers are following them into the forest to finish them off.
So it's not really for us to get into why have these groups of people hated each other for quite some time.
Who was it who stirred up all that hatred?
On what side?
But this is not just a question of here was the Russian wolf, the Russian bear, coming in and picking on Georgia for no reason at all.
The people that we are talking with, and again, these are only civilians, have been, they view the Russians as the people who saved their lives, whether they love the Russians or not.
They believe if the Russians had not shown up, the Georgians would have killed them for the last person.
Well, what were the casualties?
I know there were disputes.
Originally, the Russians said that thousands had been killed in the South Ossetian capital.
And then Human Rights Watch said, no, it was only 400 or 500.
And then I guess the latest thing I read from them was they said 400 or 500 was a good starting point for figuring out how many actually had died.
Do you have any real numbers there?
Probably about the same ones you've been looking at.
So we can say it's a figure somewhere between, figures have been quoted anywhere between 44 and I think 8,000.
So maybe it's somewhere in the middle.
Right now, the best figures seem to be about 350, 400.
It's a very small city.
And the Tskhinvali is the de facto capital of the sort of de facto separate region of South Ossetia.
And its population has been declining over recent years because there was a big war there in 92.
And there's not a lot of opportunity.
It is not getting all of this Western support.
It's not going through the kind of market reforms that you've seen in Georgia that have really been boosting the economy and seeing things surge ahead.
Again, I'm not going to get into whether that's smart on the part of the South Ossetians or not, but it's their business what kind of economy they want to have.
But in any event, I got off track a bit.
It's a small place, so 400 people.
If you saw the BBC report, they did that thing that everybody always does now, where if this number of people had been killed in the following city, it would have amounted to tens of thousands.
That's the way it came out, too, if you translated the Tskhinvali casualties into London casualties.
Yeah, I always have a hard time with all the proportional things.
Yeah, no, no.
It's absurd.
It's all a way of saying, hey, you guys didn't really lose that many in the World Trade Center.
I don't want to get into that, but certainly, proportionally, something happened.
Too many civilians were killed for it to have just been unfortunate casualties of war or collateral damage.
Well, and that really is an important point, that even if it really was all Russians' fault or whatever, like the New York Times tried to claim in the beginning, then that still doesn't make it okay to shoot up a bunch of women and children.
I would say not, yeah.
I don't know why that has to be such a particular distinction that people have to make, but apparently it does.
Well, it's a distinction to make now.
Certainly, I would say one thing.
When you have that kind of targeting and it seems to be as a conscious decision, at least in some cases, that's an indication that you're dealing with a situation where it's not what you would think of as a modern state kind of defending itself or attacking another state.
It's something that deals with people's hatred of some other group of people.
You and I could be sat down right now on the streets of any village on the border between Georgia and South Ossetia, and I can tell you we wouldn't know the difference between one person and the other.
It's another situation like Ireland or any other thing where people who are sort of indistinguishable to outsiders have beefs against each other.
This is what Lyra has been trying to do all these years, is to get past all of these kind of hatred.
There's been a lot of intermarriage, and there are Georgian-Ossetian families and so forth.
The problem with the way that this story played out when it happened, and it played out that way because Russia got involved, and that sets off a lot of alarm bells in the United States, not surprisingly.
But you have to look at it as a situation where we don't really know the politics.
We don't know the people or the history or what's been going on all this time.
We don't come in and say, hey, there's another thing we can set up according to our template of the Orange Revolution and the Rose Revolution and the March Spring in Beirut and these other kinds of things.
They don't.
This is a specific, different situation that needs to be looked at and respected according to its own terms, especially before we give another billion dollars to one side.
Well, it's funny, the contrast between the kind of giant-level politics of Dick Cheney going to Azerbaijan and saying, yeah, well, we're going to build another pipeline and suck even more oil out from under the Caspian Sea.
And how do you like that?
At the same time, as you say, you have really this pretty small region.
But I guess as a result of the fact that these societies go back for so long that you literally have these people divided by one mountain from each other and whatever through here who consider themselves entirely different ethnically and have, you know, grudges that go back who knows how long, the kinds of things that Americans could never really understand, not policymakers anyway, and certainly couldn't exploit, quote-unquote, correctly to anybody's real advantage.
They're playing with fire over there, it seems like.
Yeah, I would say so.
And, you know, one thing to make clear is the fact that there are grudges that have been around for a long time doesn't mean you can't solve them.
I mean, people get along better year by year generally, you know, in the world when they live together for long periods of time.
I don't think that's something that can't be solved.
It's just that the way to solve it is not by arming one side to the teeth and, you know, allowing it to run havoc over another side or to try to impose its will.
Now, Georgia has now really fought two wars over these regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and it's pretty much lost both times.
And, you know, now they want independence.
And, in fact, Lyra, the person we represent, she doesn't like to get too much into the politics, but is skeptical now that the South Ossetians can ever live under, you know, as part of greater Georgia.
And these are very small regions, you know.
I mean, if you looked at them on the map, they're really tiny places.
They're small towns.
There are not really that many people.
So it's kind of hard as an American to get your mind around this idea, but, you know, that is the reality of the situation.
Yeah, it's like Houston seceding from Texas kind of situation.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, even the American secession issue involved a far larger region than we're talking about here.
Well, and the situations are different in Ossetia and Abkhazia, right, because Abkhazia is right there on the Caspian Sea and apparently has its own little economy and perhaps could get by independently.
All Ossetia really can do is go from the autonomy under Georgia that they used to have to, basically, autonomy under Russia again.
That's what it seems.
And I think, you know, the attitude of people there, and I'm not speaking about the South Ossetian government now, which I'm not sure I would want to be in a position of having to defend them.
So, you know, I don't know what their attitude is, but I think the attitude of people there seems to be that whoever can guarantee that people are not going to be shooting at us, they're the ones that we'll be for.
So, you know, right now that seems to be Russia.
Russia seems to be the guarantor of their life and some level of liberty in pursuit of happiness.
So that's where they're looking.
Well, and there's, you know, we're talking in the middle of Texas here, where most of us think Georgia's over there between Florida and South Carolina.
We're talking about this tiny little space between the Caspian and the Black Sea.
Right.
And, well, I guess I'm curious as to if you know the history, like how autonomous Ossetia was in the past, say before the Bolsheviks came and the rise of the Soviet Union and all that.
I mean, has it always been more or less part of Georgia or going back?
How long do you know?
You know, the most, in the Soviet Union, Georgia is an interesting, Georgia itself is a fairly interesting case.
Stalin was a Georgian and the, you know, Georgia came under the control of imperial Russia.
And it was part of what was considered Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution.
The Ossetians, and there's South Ossetia and North Ossetia, and, you know, we're on the radio, so I can't really show you the map, but they are divided by what is internationally known as the border between Georgia and Russia.
So if you...
Well, and by the mountain range, right, the Caucasus Mountains.
Yeah, there's a big mountain and there's a big tunnel that you have to pass through to get into South Ossetia.
But at the time, in the 20s, I believe, before everything had really shaken out with the Bolsheviks, you know, there was still active fighting going on to determine who was going to get control of imperial Russia.
The Ossetians wanted to get independence, and that was sort of settled as it has been settled, that it would be part of a greater Georgia, it would be within the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
And that compromise seemed to work.
You know, there wasn't...
It's hard to say how much tension there was over anything in the Soviet Union because there was so much brutalizing of everybody in the Soviet Union.
But, you know, certainly they seemed to function and continue to, you know, produce new generations for years and years.
When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
And as part of that, you know, that might have been okay, but the new Georgian government really kind of rallied people in this Milosevic type of way with the slogan of Georgia for Georgians, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, the usual sort of things that you see in these new republics where your sense of national pride somehow involves getting rid of some ethnic group within your borders.
So there was a pretty nasty war that went on in 1992.
Under the settlement of that, that's how Ossetia and Abkhazia got...
South Ossetia and Abkhazia got their autonomy within Georgia and have enjoyed it ever since.
When I use the word enjoyed loosely because there's been sniping on both sides over the years and people have been shooting across the border.
Georgia has occasionally tried to, you know, assert its will.
Saakashvili, you know, is a great disappointment, not just to his neocon handlers, but, you know, it seemed when he came in and they did away with Edward Chevers-Nadze, who was the, you know, this old Soviet holdover, that you might be looking at a new era of somebody who was all about progress and about, you know, market economies and Milton Friedman-style economics.
And to their somewhat credit, they did try and do that.
They set up this little Potemkin village.
There was an article about that in the New York Times a few weeks ago, too, under this guy Dmitry Senekoev, who had a little well-subsidized area that he was in control of because the pro-Georgian governor of South Ossetia is how he was sort of defined.
And, you know, they built up a lot of modern hotels and conveniences and stores and cafes and that kind of stuff, all of which got destroyed in the war.
And he himself was widely viewed, I believe, as a Benedict Arnold among the South Ossetians for calling Georgia's tune.
Again, maybe I've rambled off a bit.
Oh, no, that's all interesting stuff.
Yeah, you know, there is a way for people to get along, and probably the way is for people to be left alone by, you know, armed armies and militias to go about their peaceful business.
That's not what's happening, and that is not what Georgia allowed to happen in South Ossetia.
Yeah, well, and as you pointed out at the beginning, you know, American intervention here, our money, our weapons, our training, and all that kind of thing, destroys everybody's local incentive structure and changes the whole, you know, chess game for everyone.
Yeah.
And makes things worse, obviously.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, you know, I don't know whether Saakashvili is going to survive or, you know, and by that I mean politically survive.
He apparently got a call from President-elect Obama yesterday reasserting American support for him.
Great.
You know, Georgia has its own reasons to be worried about, right?
You know, all of Russia's former clients and former states have reasons to be a little bit worried about Russian ambitions on their territory, but the way to address that, as I think you're getting at, is not to just view this as, here's this guy who has to defend himself against Russia, you know, we're going to give him the best of everything, all of the new technology and new weapons and arms from the U.S. and from the former Warsaw Pact countries and from Israel, and, you know, try and get them into NATO.
You know, I think everybody has had this feeling when the war broke out.
Like, if they had been in NATO, we'd be at war with Russia right now over, you know, over this place that none of us could find on a map.
I think everybody's glad that that didn't happen.
Well, and Sarah Palin, of course, explained that, yes, well, that's what a NATO guarantee means, Charlie.
Yes, we might have to, we just might have to have a war with Russia to protect Georgia, she said.
Right.
Well, that's why, you know, maybe we could tag this to subprime loans, you know.
That's why you're happy with France and Germany and even Poland being in NATO.
And you're not happy with, you know, Georgia or Ukraine or these places that you don't really know which way they're going to lie.
And you certainly know that their interests are not as lined up with the interests of the United States as we, as, you know, as Randy Scheunemann likes to think.
Right.
Saakashvili has his own ambitions and his own things that he wants to get across, and they're not as in tandem with American, with what's in the best interest of the United States as certainly the original coverage of this war would lead you to believe.
And as you noted, there has been quite a shift recently in the way the war is being viewed and a lot more realism about Georgia's actions prior to and during the five-day crisis.
There's a lot to get into there.
I don't know whether, how much you want to get into that, but.
Well, sure, go ahead.
I've got questions, but I've got a plan, too.
Go ahead.
Let's take your questions.
Well, I have a pen, too, so go ahead.
All right.
You know, there had been this, you know, Georgia's claim is that Russia has been ratcheting up the situation throughout the summer and was spoiling for a chance to attack Georgia.
There are reasons to take some of that seriously.
There are reasons not to take a lot of it seriously, too.
They claim the Russians were on their way into South Ossetia when Georgia attacked, i.e., they had no choice but to do, you know, it was like another thing like the six-day war in 1967 when it's clear your enemy is, you know, about to enter your territory, you strike first.
What you could actually literally, without lying, call a preemptive war.
Exactly right.
No, I mean, that's what they mean when they say preemptive war.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about that version of events, you know, the biggest one being that there was this notorious television broadcast by Saakashvili about 730.
On August 7th, Saakashvili goes on TV and gives this big broadcast directed at the people of South Ossetia and, you know, I love the South Ossetian people.
The separatists, unfortunately, have not been accepted by Olive Branch and they're continuing to shell us, but I'm going to go the extra mile here and we are not going to respond to any provocations.
And so we're ordering an immediate unilateral ceasefire.
And so that's that.
And they have never really directly answered the question of why, within a few hours, I believe by the end, and I don't want to start naming hours on the clock because I'm not, the timeline is in very serious dispute here and I don't want to say anything that I can't back up, but within a few hours of that, Georgia had begun a really massive artillery bombardment of the city of Tynvali, and we have, if you go to a site that Lyra has put together called truthforossetia.org, she has been collecting eyewitness accounts just from people who all have the same story to tell.
You know, I went to bed, I was figuring, oh, this is great, now we can all relax.
Let's go to bed.
The next thing I know, it's the middle of the night and the first shell I heard was the one that hit my living room.
So they began this serious bombardment, began moving in troops, troops moved in a large armored column.
We are not really sure what that column consisted of, although there's been a lot of effort to track down who it was that sat on the Tsar Road or the village called Tsar and sort of a main highway out of Tynvali that people were using to try and escape, to get up north, to get away from the invading Georgian army, and that is where a lot of the incidents I was talking about earlier occurred with people in their cars getting shot at, getting cars set on fire, being in one case everybody pulled over and soldiers argued for a few minutes and then just shot everybody in the car, not really sure whether they were supposed to take them hostage or not, and then just figured, oh, we have to keep moving or whatever.
You know, things like that happen in wars.
So it's unclear really what Saakashvili's ambition was, whether he was telling the truth when he said he was going to have the ceasefire and did he, as the Georgian government has subsequently claimed, did they have to respond because there was a lot of shelling that had killed a couple of Georgian soldiers on their side of the border.
They've also claimed that the U.S. showed them some satellite images that showed Russian forces entering South Ossetia The U.S. Undersecretary of State, during congressional testimony, subsequently stated that the U.S. had no satellite imagery of Georgia or the Caucasus because all their satellites were pointed at Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And another story the Georgians have come up with is that they had some cell phone intercepts between South Ossetian border guards talking about new Russian tanks coming in.
And again, even that isn't really clear what they're referring to from the cell phone intercepts.
You know, the Georgians have been very, very good at working the American media.
You know the whole connection between John McCain and Saakashvili and Randy Scheunemans, Orion, I believe is the name of his firm.
Right, the guy made more than a million dollars representing the government of Georgia and he was John McCain's number one neocon handler.
Right.
Foreign policy guy.
I never saw how this one worked out, but there was some kind of talk and then a couple of news stories I saw that indicated Randy Scheunemans had been let go by McCain just a week or so before the election.
Right, in the fighting over Sarah Palin.
Oh, is that what it was?
Yeah, he defended her against the Bush administration people or whatever like that.
But the real point there I thought was interesting, and this is something that Ray McGovern said on the show yesterday, that Scheunemans and Dick Cheney's office were telling Saakashvili, go ahead, we have your back, whereas the State Department apparently was saying otherwise.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You know, there was this visit by Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi earlier in the summer and she apparently gave a message that was, you know, we are not going to have your back and do not do this.
Do not try and ratchet things up because this is not going to, you know, I believe the EU told him the same thing.
I believe Sarkozy made it clear that they weren't going to be getting any support from the EU either.
So, yeah, it is interesting.
It's worth finding out.
It's something that people should be looking into is how much was Saakashvili himself getting sort of conflicting signals from people.
He certainly didn't seem to have his finger very well on the pulse of which way the election was going, if he thought that McCain's word was what he should be looking at before starting a war.
Well, you know, if any of the reaction from McCain's loss out of Georgia that I read, or out of the Georgian government that I read in the papers, was any example seemed like they really wanted McCain and it made sense.
Obviously, you know, the conventional wisdom, and I guess this really played true, that when the subject was who's going to keep you safe, people liked McCain for foreign policy stuff, and back in August this really did provide him with quite a bump, the way I remember it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it wasn't enough, thank goodness.
Yeah, well, you know, we are not all Georgians.
We were not all Georgians then.
We're not all Georgians now.
We're not going to be all Georgians any time in the future.
Got that right.
I'm a Texan.
You know, there's no point in continuing to pick on John McCain, but it certainly, just for establishing the narrative, it's worth finding out, was the Georgian government getting some kind of weird signals from political campaigners that fudged the much more clear message they were getting from the State Department and from the Bush administration, which was that you guys need to tone it down.
You know, the same question goes for all the politicians and the media after it happened, which, you know, how could it be that it's only been two weeks or so since the New York Times came out and said, oh, by the way, we were completely wrong about this.
I mean, there was no question at the time.
I just happened to work for Justin Raimondo, so I know this.
It was in the Telegraph.
It was in Haaretz.
It was in everything around the world that the Georgians started this thing and the Russians came in to protect their peacekeepers in South Ossetia and the people of South Ossetia from the Georgian invasion, and that was just a fact on the face of it, and yet the entire American media lied about it.
You know, Barack Obama initially gave a statement that was a little bit waffly and then came out hard on the side of this unprovoked aggression by Russia will not stand and all this talk, and they got away with a complete lie worth of spin for months before having to come back and admit.
How could that be, really?
That really puzzles me that, I mean, hell, it was the front page of the London Times, the London Telegraph, every paper in the world except here.
Yeah, yeah.
The U.S. has been particularly, if you look at any of the comments on, you know, the New York Times story, for example, also the BBC's Tim Hewell had a big, long follow-up that in some ways got this ball rolling, and, you know, there's the Human Rights Watch announcements and all that.
If you look at the comments people have been making online about all that, it's, there's, you know, surprise, surprise, there's everybody talking about, oh, ha, ha, look at these ignorant Americans who don't know anything about anything.
But in this case, it's kind of been on point, and they're saying, you know, what are you guys acting like you just discovered this news?
If you had been, you know, paying attention to any news outside of the, you know, the large American news outlets, you would have known the story was not nearly as simple as you made it out to be.
Well, we'll see how much opportunity people like you have for continuing to set the story straight.
I know that initial impression can be very powerful.
I don't think it's been overcome around here yet.
Yeah, you'd be surprised.
I've been interested, and I mean, I'm not somebody who follows this stuff as a general rule, and so when I talk to people I know and realize that they've been starting to hear about these new stories, it's kind of encouraging.
And, you know, what that's going to mean in the new administration, we don't know.
The U.S. is committed to this new billion-dollar aid package, and, you know, the EU and various others have promised this $4.5 billion relief package that is even more than apparently Georgia needed just to do, you know, wartime repairs at a time when, you know, at this point $4.5 billion is chump change, right?
At the same time, it's more billions of dollars that the United States does not have, and my great-grandchildren are going to be paying for it, along with all the other billions that we're giving for everything.
So it's unclear what's going to happen with any of that stuff.
You know, Obama is a new guy.
He's not committed to the same type of people who were promoting Saakashvili in the past.
They did have this phone call yesterday, which the Georgians characterize as a friendly phone call, and, you know, he has his own commitments, his own campaign commitments on Russia, which is to make a more proactive policy toward Russia.
As with all things in the Obama-verse, it's not clear what proactive means, whether that means we get tougher with them, whether we talk with them more, whether we find more areas of common ground.
But, again, you know, by talking about it this way, we are getting away from certainly what Lira would like, the message she would like to get out, which is that, you know, there's more going on here than just a great game superpower confrontation.
This is something where there are people on the ground who have their own lives they want to live, and their lives are not subject to, you know, grand designs that are made up on K Street.
Okay.
And, really, that's the bottom line about all this stuff is it's wrong to murder people.
Yeah, you know, I think we can find common ground.
I don't know if Randy Scheunemann would get on board with that, but I think we could find pretty common ground of agreement on that.
This is where anti-war.com and Reason certainly see eye to eye.
Absolutely.
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Tim.
Oh, thanks a lot, Scott.
You've been quite up to speed on the topic.
I was psyched.
Yeah, well, it's interesting stuff for me.
All right.
So thanks a lot.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Tim Kavanaugh from Reason Magazine.
He's now representing – are you still there, Tim?
Yes.
Help me pronounce this lady's name.
My name is Lyra Chobhrabova.
I will give you her website.
Sure.
They are truthforacetia.org and helpacetianow.org.
You can go and get up-to-the-minute news and everything Acetia and Georgia related.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Thanks.
We're already over time, but I think there's nothing but a rerun coming up, so what the hell.
I'm going to go ahead and play a song real quick, but then I'm done.
It's been Anti-War Radio Chaos 97 in Austin.