Miliband Needs a History Lesson

Today I listened to our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband discussing the Russian/ Georgian conflict.You can follow to the entire interview here.
Amongst his usual ramblings he said this:

 "The sight of Russian tanks rolling into part of a sovereign country on its neighbouring borders will have brought a chill to the spine of many people, rightly, because that is a reversion to - it's not just Cold War politics, it's a 19th Century way of doing politics."

This  took me back to June  2006. As reported here, tanks, this time those of the  Israeli  Defence Force, were invading part of a sovereign country on its neighbouring border on perhaps an equally thin pretext used by the Russians for entering South Ossetia.
Unlike today, when the US/UK are  trying to outdo each other in meaningless anti Russian rhetoric, there was no criticism of Israel's "spine chilling 19th century way of doing politics".
 Back in 2006, both the British and Americans allowed Israel to flatten northern Lebanese towns, killing thousands before they murmured the word "ceasefire".
How different it was yesterday with one of the west's favourites, Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili. His  forces, given Dutch courage by  their American training, and with a carrot of EU and NATO membership being dangled before his eyes  foolishly tried to fulfil an election pledge to recover South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Comments

[Brian Barder]

A very telling parallel. I assume that D Miliband was choosing his words with his usual care and that he was intentionally (if implicitly) also disowning and condemning the NATO attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999 and the US-UK attack on Iraq in 2003, both in clear breach of international law and with even less excuse than anything Russia has done this week in Georgia and South Ossetia.

I have posted some observations on this imbroglio on my blog here.

Brian