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August 11, 2008

Confused Americans for Truth - War in the Other Georgia

Occasionally Bruce and I will watch TV shows from the Seventies, and periodically a child on one of these TV shows will ask an adult why we have wars, and the adult will talk around it like there's some huge mystery. This annoys me, because it's a fundamentally stupid question. A nation is no more or less than a region of the Earth's surface controlled by a particular government's force of arms. If two nations disagree about who exactly has the aforementioned control in a particular area, they go to war over it. War is therefore just a practical test of the whole control and force-of-arms thing.

Currently, Georgia and Russia are attempting to decide who runs the region of South Ossetia, which comprises approximately 6% of Georgia's land mass and 2% of its population. Russia has been allowing the occupants of South Ossetia to voluntarily become Russian citizens, so when Georgia moved in early this month to confirm its dominion, Russia was legitimately able to claim its own people were at risk. The resulting conflict has spread outside the disputed region into the main territory of Georgia itself.

America has a close relationship with Georgia. We've provided training and equipment to the Georgian military, and they've sent troops to Iraq. It's not obvious, however, that we should act on that relationship and intervene on the side of the Georgians. See, while it's easy to find allegations of wrongdoing by one side or the other, it's not easy to figure out exactly what the Russians and the Georgians hope to accomplish and which side has the more reasonable claim. This is because the issue here is not something clean or rational like who gets the oilfields or the quality cropland. Instead, it's about how we create well-defined ethnic homelands among people who haven't sorted themselves into neat geographic partitions.

The ethnic homeland idea has its roots in the imperial empires of Western Europe in the early Twentieth Century. For example, India was run by Great Britain, and the people of India felt they should be running the place themselves. The correct answer to this problem would be to argue that the people who live in a particular region should be the ones who get to rule it. The wrong answer is that you have to be like somebody to understand them, and that therefore we need to partition people along ethnic boundaries. I mean, it's obvious that the whole ethnic partition thing can't work: the ethnic homeland of the Jews overlaps the ethnic homeland of the Arabs, the ethnic homeland of the Sikhs is claimed by both the Indians and the Pakistanis, and the ethnic homeland of the Serbs is the only place in the whole of Eastern Europe that has never had any Serbians living in it.

Here in America we have our own version of the ethnic-homeland concept-- racial gerrymandering. As a result of amendments to the Voting Rights Act and various court decisions, legislative districts must be drawn up in such a way as to guarantee appropriate racial majorities in a certain percentage of the districts. Since the Voting Rights Act trumps any other considerations, a clever politician can arrange for the districts to be drawn in such a way that his party gets control of the legislature. In Illinois, even dimwitted politicians can do this, and the districts change so rapidly that even the elected officials aren't sure whom they're representing. It's not exactly a blueprint for good government.

I am making light of this stuff, but it's serious business. For many years, Israel was afraid that if they gave Muslims the vote, Palestinian sympathizers could muster the electoral strength to convert the country to a Muslim Republic. Some have argued that's how the Lebanese civil war got its start. Blowing things up is not going to solve this problem, and neither is posturing in front of the United Nations. The only solution is to do something a lot of people find scary: reduce the power of government.

Seriously, if the government is too weak to ruin your life, then it's no big deal that the legislature is low on people who go to the same church or have your precise skin tone and nasal architecture. That's why we here in America have a system of checks and balances, and that in turn is why we've been able to operate so long while so many other nascent democracies have been giving map-makers headaches.

So the question is not who rules South Ossetia, the question is why do the people of South Ossetia care? It's a question that isn't answered by flags or ancestral grievances or population drift or even by the body counts in the past week. It can only be answered by and figuring out why the people of Georgia and Russia care and what we need to do so that the question is not worth all this killing.

Until then, it's an excellent example of why we have war.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Mon 6:27 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags: conservative ethnic cleansing Georgia Lebanon philosophy Russia South Ossetia United Nations War and Peace

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Posted by: kevin at August 11, 2008 10:37 AM

Posted by: bruce at August 11, 2008 1:13 PM