What is "home"? What is "neighborhood"? They seem like pretty relative concepts to me. If you are going to license Russia's actions in/against Georgia, then why not license the U.S.'s actions in Haiti or Guatemala? That's the U.S.'s neighborhood, geographically speaking, as much as Georgia is Russia's, right? Dwayne, I think you are relying too much on doxa here: geography is not neutral; there are never impartial, common sense views of geography, right, and interest. They are always political.
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I'm not "licensing" anything.
I'm saying that if I'm sitting in my goddamn house and rockets start falling, I'm going to want something done about it.
I'm not relying on 'doxa'.
I'm relying on a review of the events as they unfolded.
The U.S.'s actions in Haiti or Guatemala don't count because only an idiot or an ideologue (which is often much the same thing) would've believed that American intervention was justified; built, as it was, on the fiction that the United States faced an existential threat from these tiny nations and their internal politics.
But in the case of Russia/Georgia, there is a clearly traceable cause and effect -- no Edward Bernays crafted propaganda. There were real missiles falling on real people. Full stop.
I keep mentioning those missiles because I firmly believe in dealing with the concrete first and foremost and only exploring abstractions when I've exhausted the facts as understood. Pro and amateur political theorists and keyboard strategists have a weakness for grand theories which ignore the actually existing causal chain. To me, that's a sort of waking dream or brain-fashioned virtual reality. It seems terribly complex and clever but is a poor substitute for the hard work of trying to understand what's really happening.
.d.