Bad Assumptions

I hate it when my assumptions are wrong, and boy, was I wrong this week.

When the Russians rolled their tanks into Georgia last week, I assumed, as did most of my colleagues, that the Russians were the aggressors. After all, they were the evil empire weren’t they? Even though they got their backsides spanked when they lost the Cold War, it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge again and get them back to their old evil ways. Right? Right?

Unfortunately, this was not the case at all.

It turns out that the Russians didn’t just wantonly launch an attack against Georgia. They were responding to aggression from the Georgians. That’s right. We originally thought that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that originated from Russia and Ukraine and were launched at Georgia were a precursor to the physical attacks and maybe even encouraged by the Russian government. In reality, the DDoS attacks were a protest against the Georgians bombing Ossetia. Stop! Go back and read that last sentence again. That is not a typo. For reasons that are too complicated to get into here (Kimberly Zenz, our Russian analyst, will write more detail for the WTR next week) the Georgians were bombing Ossetia after repeated warnings by the Russian government to stop. So, the Russians rolled their tanks.

You can argue that the Russian response was too much if you want to, but you can’t argue that they were not provoked. I was so ready to believe my base assumptions (Russia = E V I L E M P I R E) that it didn’t even occur to me that Russia might have had a real reason for going to war. You may not agree with it, but they had one. It reminds me of what the Great Samuel Jackson said in the movie “Long Kiss Goodnight”: “Everyone knows, when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of ‘u’ and ‘umption.’” You go, Sammy!