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Antiwar Radio Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Tim Kavanaugh.
He's a Reason columnist and hit-and-run contributor.
That's their blog there at Reason.com.
And he was the online editor of the L.A.
Times, and he's written for, I don't know, just about every newspaper in the world, or something looks like here on the page.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for being here, and good to be back.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess we're honoring a solemn two-year anniversary, right?
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know so much honoring it as just trying to recall it and the importance of it.
You know, this is a real problem that we face, is that where in the heck is the Black Sea, anyway?
You know what I mean?
People have no idea where former Soviet Georgia is, and they certainly, well, if they're anything like me, and I already know about it, I still can't figure out why it's any of my business, and why I should care at all what's going on in former Soviet Georgia.
But I guess it has something to do with the fact that my government is involved over there.
What is the deal?
What do people need to know about Georgia?
Where is it, really?
Where is the Black Sea or whatever?
And then why is it that it's of concern to people who live in L.A. or Texas or New Hampshire or wherever they're listening to this today?
Well, it's probably of less concern than it used to be, not only because it has been relatively quiet there.
We're talking about, if you haven't mentioned this on the show already, and we were talking about two years ago, there was really a five-day war between Georgia and Russia over a breakaway region within Georgia called South Ossetia.
It factored fairly importantly in the presidential election at the time.
It was certainly a big reassertion of power by Vladimir Putin, who's now the prime minister and de facto supreme leader of Russia.
And so that happened in August of 2008.
Ever since then, South Ossetia has been either occupied or protected, according to which side you're on, by Russian troops, and the Georgians have managed to move on.
The wrinkle in 2008 was that Mikhail Stakishvili, the president of Georgia and still the president of Georgia, was a fairly good friend of John McCain's.
They knew each other personally, and they also shared a common friend with Randy Scheunemann, who was the head flack at a PR firm called Orion Strategies.
And as you can imagine, Georgia is the birthplace of Stalin.
It's a lot smaller than Russia, you probably guessed, but Russia obviously handed them their asses in this war, although the Georgian army had been recently refitted and retrained by the United States.
We had a case of actual American weaponry and tactics going up against old-school Russian-style tactics, and the Russians came out on top.
The Georgian army was not as spirited or cohesive, I believe, as people expected it to be.
And that's basically the situation we have right now.
Okay, so you've got tiny little Georgia and even tinier little South Osetia, which is basically like an autonomous breakaway sort of province that people can debate going back over history as to whether it quote-unquote belongs to Georgia or not or whatever, but it was nominally part of Georgia and yet de facto independent, protected by Russian peacekeepers.
Then the Georgians tried to take it back violently, and in doing so had to, of course, bomb Russian troops who were the NATO-approved peacekeepers under the deal that had been made in Osetia.
So then the Russians came over the mountains and under the mountains and pushed the Georgians back out.
But they didn't conquer Georgia, right?
They just pushed them back out of Osetia and maybe pushed the line a little bit further.
It seemed to me like what was happening on the ground there hardly measured up to the rhetoric coming out of the Obama and McCain campaigns, especially McCain first, but then Obama played catch-up, and the rest of the news was that Russia has attacked a tiny, helpless little state.
It was like the time that Hitler rolled into Czechoslovakia.
Yeah, and especially for those of us who grew up on the great tales of Russian depredation on the East Germans when they conquered them in World War II, it was pretty, and subsequent, very credible stories of really hellacious Russian behavior in Chechnya and, of course, in Afghanistan back in the day.
By comparison with those, you'd have to say this was a pretty professional Russian army that rolled into South Osetia and into parts of Georgia from which it subsequently withdrew partly, as always in these cases, the two sides differ on how to complete their withdrawal from what was previously recognized as actual Georgian territory, not under dispute.
But yeah, it's war.
Bad stuff happens at all times.
People commit crimes on both sides all the time in war, so I'm not going to say there were nice guys or anything, but there was no concerted effort to prey upon the Georgians when they came in.
I would not say there was an organized, from top to bottom, effort to prey on the South Osetians by the Georgians in the few days when they had the upper hand.
However, there were some very serious abuses that continue to be looked at by Amnesty International and the UN and so forth.
Specifically, there was one road, which was really the only civilian road out of town, and everybody who tried to get out of there with their families got blasted by Georgian troops as they were trying to get out.
But it went fairly well as these things go, and the Russians have been fairly scrupulous in sticking to where they are.
There's stuff all the time.
Every day there's some shooting incident, somebody gets killed.
It may have been dying down in recent months, but that continued for a long time after the official hostilities ended.
But yeah, I didn't mean to go on about that.
No, no, that's fine.
And now back to the media thing a little bit here, if we can rewind it back to two years ago.
You know how we are at AntiWar.com.
We're digging through the news all over the world all day, and so in the middle of the night when the stories first started breaking, all the truth came out.
Georgia invades Osetia.
Russians retaliate, et cetera, like this was how the story broke.
Everybody knew that.
And yet in the New York Times and the Washington Post and therefore TV and everybody else in the American media, the consensus was that at the very least no one is to challenge John McCain when he asserts that Russia simply aggressively invaded this helpless little nation, which was the way that he phrased it.
And there was even a very awkward kind of thing going on on the stage in one of the debates hosted by Tom Brokaw, where John McCain says, yeah, Russia started it, and Barack Obama goes along with it.
And you can see that there's kind of this awkward eye contact where they're all kind of telling each other suddenly, okay, so we're going to just go ahead and pretend that that's the truth for the sake of this argument.
Okay, fine.
It's just ridiculous.
And then it was like the end of November.
The New York Times wrote a piece called, Oh, yeah, I guess we were lying to you the whole time about what happened there.
Yeah.
I was actually part of walking back that story, and just as Randy Scheunemann was hired by the Georgians to represent their interests and pretty effectively put the kind of story out that you just mentioned.
And there was a little bit of controversy.
A lot of this is ancient history, but it's not totally clear when Scheunemann was working for the Georgians.
And, I mean, when you do this, even as a flat, you've got to register with the Justice Department as an agent of a foreign government.
It's not that serious, but it's actual official stuff.
And he was a paid – Orion Strategies, his PR firm, was a paid client of the Georgians out there to get the word out that Georgia's our friend and put the pro-Georgian side out.
I ended up doing not for the state of Ossetia, which is this sort of, as you mentioned, a fairly not totally credible tiny state that has declared its independence now and been recognized by Russia and maybe a few other marginal countries.
But I was not representing that.
Government was representing some individuals in Ossetia trying to get their point across.
All right, now hold it right there.
We'll get back to your full disclaimer when we get back from this break.
Everybody, this is Tim Kavanaugh from Reason Magazine.
I don't mean to go on with the disclaimer.
Sorry.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's fine.
It's good.
We'll be right back with Tim Kavanaugh after this, y'all.to find out at shows.lrn.fm.
That's shows.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
There's a little bit of poison idea for the LRN listeners and a lot of poison idea for the Chaos crew out there.
I am Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio, and I'm talking with Tim Kavanaugh from Reason Magazine.
And, Tim, you were explaining how you were actually hired by some private South Ossetians to help get the truth out in the face of the American Empire's media narrative at the time during the Georgia-Russia War of two years ago.
That is correct.
The person we were working for was a private individual in South Ossetia who had a legitimate concern that maybe their side wasn't being represented.
And in order to get...
It was a hard narrative to walk back, because you mentioned a little while ago that initially Obama made some...and this was then-Senator Barack Obama, candidate for president, made some fairly lukewarm comments on the thing, and McCain immediately called him out for his lack of patriotism.
Right.
And, you know, it's sort of weird, because it's your lack of patriotism in the defense of some other country.
You know, Obama did sort of...
He went along, as he did during the campaign, came out with some fairly heavy anti-Russian comments, and very pro-Georgian type stuff.
There the narrative rested for several months in the United States, and it is true that the United States was way behind the rest of the world in terms of its view.
I don't want to say behind, but it was not on the same page with much of the rest of the world's view on what had happened.
And it took a lot of digging.
There was a British Army captain who was with the multinational peacekeeping force in Georgia, Ossetia, to come forward with his own testimony about what had happened that really blew apart the Georgian narrative.
And the Georgians are very good.
It's not just Randy Scheunemann.
They're good on their own.
They're Western-trained.
They have a lot of...
Saakashvili has...
If you go and hang out with his cabinet, you will feel like you're in the arms of a bunch of college good old boys from Cleveland or something.
So they were real good at presenting their side of the story.
They had done a ton of wiretapping.
They had a lot of evidence to create this narrative that they had, that Saakashvili realized the Russians were coming in and the Ossetians were shooting at him, so he had to react and go after the Ossetians.
None of that was true, and all of it has been subsequently smashed by all of the timelines, everything that anybody could put together.
All of the evidence is that the Russians were actually very slow.
I mean, it was about 36 hours, I believe, between when the Georgians rolled across.
And this is a small area.
I mean, they're tiny little countries.
If I were a hack at the New York Times, I would say that's the size of Connecticut.
I'm not sure what it's the size of, but it's a pretty small area.
Between the time that the Georgians roll into South Ossetia and the Russians come through what is called the Roki Tunnel, which separates South Ossetia from Russia proper, it was about a day to a day and a half before the Russians really got there in force and were able to kick the Georgians back out.
So that was a narrative that you had to walk back.
The Russians had been the aggressors, and we successfully did that.
But as you noted, it took until November 7th, I believe, is when that story came out in the New York Times.
Unfortunately, in this case, and I'm sorry if I sounded disparaging about the New York Times a minute ago, because it was like night and day.
We were getting our side of the story into papers all over the country, into media, on the web, everything else.
When the New York Times story came out, it was like night and day.
Suddenly, Saakashvili could not get his phone calls returned.
Everybody was paying attention to the Ossetian side of the story.
I don't want to go overboard on how important South Ossetia is.
I don't know that it is viable as a country.
There's another breakaway country, Abkhazia, which is not quite next door, but next door is a little bit of Georgia in between it.
That does have a coast on the Black Sea, which, as you noted, no one on the Earth knows where the Black Sea is.
Thank God we're not talking about the Caspian Sea, because we'd all be lost for good.
Abkhazia actually, I would say, has a little bit of viability as an independent country.
Ossetia, probably less so.
Two years on, Russia's official policy has not been to annex them, to absorb them into Russia, or anything like that.
It's to continue to act as if Ossetia is a separate country.
A couple days ago, Saakashvili was referred to as occupied territory that had to be liberated.
He does not have Barack Obama's ear the way he had John McCain's ear, though.
His position is far away.
His army has been totally smashed, and I don't know if it's really been rebuilt since.
He really hasn't got a leg to stand on, although he seems to be surviving politically in Georgia.
Well, there's a few things there.
I think I want to go back to Randy Scheunemann.
I don't know exactly.
I think I remember people saying he's a biographical neoconservative type, but I don't really know that for sure.
You say he was a lobbyist for the Georgian government, and he was an advisor to John McCain at the same time.
Please don't say I said that.
It is not clear that he had cut all of his ties with one before doing the other.
There is no smoking gun where you can point at his records and say, here, you were definitely working for the Georgians when you were also, and he was on McCain's, a senior policy advisor to the McCain campaign.
As with everything in the McCain campaign, he came to a bad end.
I believe there's some controversy between him and Michael Goldfarb about whether he, or actually Michael Goldfarb might be on his side, but there's some controversy between him and others at the McCain campaign about whether he was fired or just had his BlackBerry taken away or something.
But McCain ended up sort of walking away from Scheunemann at the end, too.
I don't want to put anybody into a box, but I think you are not totally off-base in saying that he has basically a neocon profile.
Well, what I'm really interested in, because I know there was some, at least rumor of this or whatever, I don't know if anybody ever nailed it down, but the suggestion was that the McCain campaign and or perhaps the Cheney faction in the White House or something were in contact with Chakashvili before this thing and encouraged him and told him, don't worry, we'll back you up, or led him to believe that or something.
Can you nail down any of that?
No, and I believe that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Georgia a few weeks before did not contribute to this problem.
I actually think Chakashvili is an unstable figure who, and by I mean politically unstable, he was caught on film chewing his tie at the height of this crisis, so I don't want to say too much about that.
I think he's just the least canon politically.
It sounds like the show is wrapping up, so I'll wrap up myself and just say- Well, actually, I was going to ask you, is it okay if I keep you ten more minutes?
Sure, sure.
Or do you need to go?
There's a lot more here.
It's pretty important stuff, actually.
So, yeah, I'm happy to hang out.
Okay, great.
Everybody, this is Tim Cavanaugh from Reason Magazine.
We'll be right back.
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FM All right, y'all, welcome back.
Antiwar Radio.
Talking with Tim Cavanaugh from Reason Magazine.
Thanks for staying over this extra segment with me here to go over this war.
No sweat.
Glad to be here.
I like doing revisionist history here on Antiwar Radio, because what they say happened in real time is always a lie, so the closest to truth we can get, you know, we've got to try to revise.
Now, here's the thing that- I don't know, this may be actually my favorite news story I've ever read, Tim, now that I think about it.
A new book suggests Vice President Dick Cheney pushed for the U.S. to engage militarily with Russia when Russia invaded-this is even in the Raw Stories version- invaded the U.S.
-allied Georgian Republic in 2008.
Ronald Asmus's A Little War That Shook the World says that in August 2008, as the South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia was raging, the White House looked at the possibility of taking military action to prevent Georgian forces from being routed by Russian troops.
And it says in here, Cheney appears to have been the most vocal proponent of the idea of engaging in the South Ossetia conflict, and they talk about the bombardment with missiles of- and the sealing of the Roki Tunnel, it's called.
This is the tunnel under the Caucasus Mountains that the Russian troops were pouring through.
This guy really wanted to get us into a full-fledged war with Russia on some tiny little border dispute in the Caucasus Mountains between two seas that Americans can't find on a map.
I mean, do you think that's true?
Could it really be that the wisdom and patience of George W. Bush saved us from Dick Cheney getting us into a war with the Russians?
You know, I always have had a secret sort of personal liking of George W. Bush, so I hope so.
I hope that this was going to be the war where Cheney was actually going to suit up and hit the front line himself.
You know, it would not surprise me if Cheney made the intellectual argument for engaging Russia over this.
I mean, they had so many other things, they're trying to line Russia up against Iran and all sorts of other stuff, that it's a little hard to imagine that anybody actually seriously considered this.
Of course, you know, they're running scenarios all the time about how we can fight everybody on Earth, and as you know, as somebody who follows this stuff, and follows, I don't want to say neocons, but maybe contemporary mainstream big government conservatism, you know, there is a large section of our population that thinks the problem is there are still some countries we haven't gone to war with.
Yep.
Well, and Russia, the guys that have, you know, 3,000 to our 5,000 hydrogen bombs that could erase our entire society and maybe all of mankind off the face of the Earth if we pick the wrong fight.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I would imagine, you know, it always sort of tickles my imagination, too.
I'm sure it tickles Dick Cheney's, too.
It's like, would it be possible to get into a limited engagement with the Russians?
Like, everybody agrees we're going to keep the nukes in the silos, we're going to fight it out at some local level, and, you know, it would probably be pretty good.
In fact, we'd be in trouble if it didn't go pretty quickly.
Oh, I'm sorry, I was just saying, what fun!
Just imagine these kooks in their situation room playing their game.
Sure, yeah, yeah.
You know, I don't think that was ever seriously considered, of enough concern.
What was the name of that book, by the way?
I want to make sure I get a copy of it.
I know, that's what I was thinking, too.
Why didn't I get this book immediately when it came out?
A Little War That Shook the World by Ronald Asmus.
There's a raw story about it.
Cheney pushed for military conflict with Russia.
And it says in here, basically, that Stephen Hadley said, Mr. President, don't listen to him.
And Bush said, okay.
Yeah, yeah, good old Stephen Hadley.
Yeah, right, we can all rely on him.
Yeah, yeah.
To take care of good business for us.
Wow.
But, you know, it's concerning enough that we had this close relationship with a guy who is a little bit out there politically, that he thought he could kind of take on the Russians and win, and wasn't even smart about doing it.
I mean, you mentioned the Roky Tunnel.
The Roky Tunnel, this may be an argument that he's feckless and just sort of fell into the situation rather than planning it ahead of time, but one way or another it doesn't make him look good.
They should have blown up the Roky Tunnel immediately, the Georgians should have, sealed South Ossetia off and had their way with South Ossetia before the Russians would be able to get there, because it's a very mountainous region.
This tunnel's the only way in.
You have a lot of heavy vehicles that you're trying to get in, tanks and so forth.
So if they had sealed that tunnel off, it would have taken a long time for the Russians to get fully armed there, and by then the Georgians might have had a situation that the Russians couldn't just dislodge them from.
Does that indicate what?
Does that mean that Chakashvili just kind of decided this in the middle of the night or something and didn't plan it out well?
His actions indicate that.
He had given this speech, and maybe it reads a little better in the original Georgian or something, but he had given a speech on TV that night, the night before the shooting started, that said, you know, I love the Ossetian people, we're going to find peace no matter what.
And everybody went to bed thinking, OK, well, then there's the Georgian president coming for peace, so we can all relax a little bit, and then the Georgians started shooting.
And as you noted, killed a couple of Russian peacekeepers in their beds, for all I know, you know, at their posts.
And so, yeah, it is not clear that he had any kind of good game plan.
And if I were whoever the military advisor was who went in and got them up to speed, there's a lot of funny clips on YouTube, if you want to check them out, of the Russians conquering Georgian barracks, you know, the Russians, everybody's got a camera now, so all these Russian soldiers are walking through this Georgian barracks, like, look at this place, it's totally nice, it's like air-conditioned barracks, they've all got beds, everybody's got a separate closing door, it's way better than anything we have.
All of that stuff came from the United States, and came from the Americans getting them up to speed with American weapons, American-style uniforms, everything.
Well, I think, weren't there reports, Tim, that there were actually even American special forces on the ground, perhaps there for training anyway, who...
See, I wish I had all my footnotes here, but I'm sure you heard that there were reports that there were engagements, actually, with American soldiers on the ground.
Unconfirmed.
If you've got friends or relatives in the service, you will know that a lot of stuff happens that nobody ever hears about.
It's unconfirmed that Americans ever engaged the Russians.
It's, I believe, not disputed that there were Americans there, there were American military advisors there, and that they were moved away pretty quickly, they went in the opposite direction of the fighting, on American orders.
So, not sure.
And it's a chaotic situation, certainly, if a guy was there in uniform, and he's got a weapon, and somebody's shooting, he's going to shoot back.
So I don't know.
It is possible that there was some engagement, but there's not any evidence for that, just situational stuff.
Okay, so now, fast-forwarding back up to the present time, Hillary Clinton still talks a little bit about bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
Are they still serious about that?
Because I thought they'd backed off.
Yeah, that's true.
I believe that's all for Saakashvili's consumption.
I don't think there may be some seriousness about bringing Ukraine into NATO.
And, again, we've established many times nobody knows where any of these places are.
Geographically, Ukraine makes a little more sense as part of NATO.
And I am not philosophically against NATO.
I mean, I don't think NATO should exist in the first place, but as long as it's there, I'm not totally opposed to this idea that if Russia's neighbors are afraid of Russia, they have a right to do what they want, and Russia should not be able to veto that.
The real question is, are you willing to give up L.A. for them?
Well, that is the question, right.
And NATO is part of making that promise, and it's not clear that NATO should exist at all in a post-Cold War world.
But, you know, these are guys, Jordan is one of them who believes that there is still a Cold War going on, and Russia is still a great power threat to us, and that we need to be pushing them back every chance we get.
These guys have an infinite number of people that have to be pushed back, though, so I don't know how many of them you could alienate.
Right, yeah, especially before we go bankrupt like the Soviets did trying to do the same thing.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Tim.
It was good.
Thanks, guys.
Good talking to you.
Everybody, that's Tim Cavanaugh from Reason Magazine.
And we'll be right back after some of this.
