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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Bush rebuking Russia? To some Brits, that’s a joke
This week’s operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the West’s policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia, charges Simon Jenkins in a column in today’s London Guardian newspaper. “The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it,” he says.
He reminds readers that Georgia is a supposed Western ally and applicant to NATO. “The West has lost all leverage and can do nothing,” he says. “Seldom was a policy so crashingly stupid.”
Tbilisi is one of the few world cities in which Bush’s picture is a pin-up and where an avenue is named after him. But America is too busy to get involved in Georgia, otherwise engaged in wars that bear a marked resemblance to those waged by Putin. It defended the Kurdish enclaves against Saddam Hussein. It sought regime change in Serbia and Afghanistan. “As Putin’s troops in South Ossetia were staging a passable imitation of the US 101st Airborne entering Iraq, Bush was studiously watching beach volleyball in Beijing,” Jenkins says.
He says that Putin would die laughing if he read this week’s American newspapers. Bush declared the Russian invasion of Georgia “disproportionate and unacceptable.” According to Jenkins, Bush says that great powers should not go about “toppling governments in the 21st century,” as if he had never done such a thing. “The lobby for sanctions against Russia is reduced to threatening to boycott the winter Olympics. Big deal.”
