In one swift demonstration of military swagger Moscow punctured soft-headed thinking in the West that since the Soviet Union’s disintegration post-Communist Russia would be a partner supporting freedom and democracy’s progress around the world.
The invasion of Georgia was choreographed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, sending to western capitals the message that Moscow’s interests in controlling the former vassal states of the defunct Soviet empire on its borders remain unchanged.
Moscow is the capital of a state that has failed repeatedly to consummate its ambition of being equal to or greater than its western rivals since the times of Peter the Great in the early 18th century. During the last century a savage political ideology backed by military ruthlessness provided Moscow with a facade of great power status that eventually crumbled through irresolvable inner contradictions.
Its lies and weaknesses exposed, Russia momentarily withdrew behind its own frontiers while embracing cosmetic democratic reforms as a charade.
This was greeted in the West, exhausted by the Cold War, as the end of history and other associated platitudes of new age politics.
An August invasion of the small nation of Georgia is a reminder of another Moscow’s mid-summer blitzkrieg into Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the crushing of Prague Spring.
Moscow’s rulers knew then, as they do now 40 years later, that the West will not risk military confrontation for one simple reason. Russia is a giant rogue state with nuclear weapons.
But Moscow also is assured of the West’s soft-power approach – the game of endlessly talking with adversaries for keeping the pretence of doing something – as the European Union’s dependency on Russian oil and gas grows.
A nuclear weapon state sitting atop vital energy reserves is a combination that seemingly guarantees Moscow the power to bully its neighbours, and to take it for granted that the West will grudgingly respect Russia’s sphere of influence as it did during the Cold War era of a divided Europe.
For the West to reflexively appeal to the UN is worse than delusional given Moscow’s veto in the Security Council. This would be a craven gesture appeasing a rogue state in the temple of hypocrisy, and conceding there is not much the free world can do in responding to naked aggression.
Putin’s power play has its admirers, and likely none more than the power-crazed theocrats in Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his master, Ayatollah Khamenei, have been given a vivid display of how potent is the mix of nuclear weapons and energy reserves in contemplating military force against opponents.
If the West cannot protect the fragile democracy of Georgia, nor guarantee its independence and territorial integrity by doing the minimum of suspending Russia from the G-8 club, it must yet demonstrate some spine to deter rogue states – such as Iran, Sudan, or Venezuela – from imitating Putin’s swagger.
There was another August, within reach of living memory 94 years ago, when Europe tumbled into a catastrophic war. Russia’s invasion of Georgia hopefully will not be the guns of August for our generation.
But when small states are crushed by rogue powers, and the first impulse is to appease the aggressor and blame the victim as western democracies did in September 1938 over Czechoslovakia, then the catastrophe that free people desperately seek to avoid paradoxically looms closer.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
- Israel: Decades-old conflict not about to cease - Saturday November 24, 2012 at 1:56 pm
- The better man lost the U.S. election - Saturday November 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
- The puzzle in U.S. presidential elections - Saturday November 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
