What's the confirmation bias? When you select information that confirms a bias you have. Not an elegant explanation, but you've got the link to learn more. A bias I've seen in recent reports on Ukraine is Crimea as the Next Georgia (or more exactly South Ossetia).
It seems that any recent article on Crimea has a checklist of issues: Black Sea Fleet, the history of Crimea (the 1954 handover is mandatory), Georgian War and the ethnic make up of the region. The article then discusses provocative moves by Russia and Ukraine's counter moves, if any. Washington Post's recent article on Ukraine and the Crimea follows this familiar pattern (here, here, here,here).
On this point, Paul Globe writes in a recent post about the threat of war between Ukraine and Russia. Globe focuses on Ukrainian commentators who've looked at recent Russian behavior toward Ukraine.
Recently, Tolkachov writes, Mikhail Khomyakov, a Russian political exile in Ukraine, reported that broadsides with the words “A War with Ukraine Will Begin in the Near Future,” and the respected Swiss newspaper “Neue Zuercher Zeitung” said that Moscow was violating international law and threatening Ukraine just as it did before invading Georgia last year.
That paper and other Western news outlets have pointed to the mass distribution of Russian passports in Crimea just as Moscow did in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, to Moscow’s open support of pro-Moscow organizations in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, its economic and political pressure on Kyiv, and especially its propaganda efforts.
“For five years,” Tolkachov writes, “the information-propaganda machine of Russia has not ceased to lay on Ukraine blame for the deterioration of bilateral relations,” an effort that means many in Russia new view Ukraine as “an enemy of Russia – and one that is in the same rank with Georgia,” with which Russia has fought a war.
The last two months have featured even more moves that point to the danger of a beginning of hostilities. On August 11, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev delivered an “unprecedentedly harsh” attack on Ukraine, one that leaves little room for a peaceful resolution of differences barring a complete capitulation by Kyiv to all Russian demands.
In The New Yorker, George Packer has this to say about U.S. military leaders and the White House comparing Vietnam to Afghanistan that applies to this post.
Whatever the merits of Sorley’s and Goldstein’s books, two things need to be said about this official binge of historical consciousness. The first is a truism: Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There are plenty of obvious similarities, and they obsessed me enough to send me back into the Vietnam archives for my piece on Holbrooke. The similarities teach certain lessons that are more or less permanently true, but they cannot serve as fixed guides to each new and unique situation. Thinking-by-analogy can be just as dangerous as historical amnesia: because A looks like B, there’s a strong temptation to abandon the immense difficulty of understanding B on its own terms, and instead to let the outcome of A do the thinking for you. History tells you how to think, not what to think
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