A Second Hand Conjecture

(photo: Rahim Alizadeh)

In Verdi’s opera Nabucco –the namesake of the western gas pipeline to Europe that holds the promise of partial independence from Russian energy reliance– the Jewish patriots take the daughter of the Babylonian king hostage, in order to compel his charity for Jerusalem. Today, after the Georgian invasion, Azerbaijan is a victim of a not dissimilar hostage-taking by example, and it’s just as perilous.

So much a captive to the gambit is Azerbaijan, that it had to be seen embarrassingly consulting with the Russian president, while the American vice president was left to rant to reporters in their captial. Cheney wanted a Nabucco pipeline endorsement from Azerbaijan, although he didn’t get the rejection portrayed in the press, he didn’t get approval either. He got the thing Dick hates most: strategic ambiguity.

Sympathy for the Azeri position here is mandatory. Their heart is with the United States, but their survival instinct forces them to withdraw into balance. An overt endorsement of a pipeline under American pressure would have potentially been against every instinct for a country that has been playing the game of pacifying powerful neighbors for far longer than the Americans have even been aware of the region. Any pipeline threaded through Turkey to Central Europe –which Iran has been refused access to, and is designed specifically in order to bypass Russia– has long promised the Azeris hostility from her two invidious and lethally powerful neighbors. (more…)

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The point has been made more than once that the Russian incursion into South Ossetia is ideologically motivated as a retaliatory gesture for Kosovo independence. Wu Wei makes a fine point about why this is not plausible if so:

The Kosovo Albanians had had 10 years of oppression by Slobodan Milosovic in Yugoslavia before it broke up, and there had been wars provoked by him in Croatia and Bosnia, with charges of genocide generally accepted now. So people knew exactly what he was planning when he started driving Albanians out of Kosovo. And there were something like 2 million Albanians driven out of Kosovo across the border into Albania and Macedonia. Without the bombing he would not have stopped.

Bigger is not better, and war is never right. But Saakashvili, with all his faults is not Milosovic.
(Wu Wei)

True in the immediate, but there’s an underlying historical dissonance to the Russian claim as well. Kosovo is after all, the Serbian ethnic homeland. The churches of the old Serbian kings are still the dominant architectural element of the ancient towns in that country and Serbia has hereditary claims to these southern lands which predate written records. The loss of them is just as ancient a grievance, given that their uprising against the Ottomans in 1690s is what sent them north.

The key difference here is that any South Ossetian claim to Russian identification is as young as 1801 at the earliest. As for the ethnically Russian emigrees, that mostly goes back to the 20th century. These are not comparable claims for Russian territorial identity upon the land.

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Fiorana is a new company that is manufacturing blue jeans specially made to accommodate a certain widely admired latina asset. According president Mike Braden, “The Latina body is different in waist and hip structure. When wearing Anglo cut jeans, there is always a fit problem around the waist area.” Laura Martinez is skeptical about the high price ($100 a pair) and the broader ethnic generalization. I guess I was surprised there was such a thing as a “Anglo jeans, ” but if so, I couldn’t be tortured into condemning their tight fit on latina women.

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