Georgia Falls Victim to Pipeline Politics? Not in the BBC Report

I’ve written before about how BBC copy editors like to slap on headlines that at best misrepresent the content of the articles, presumably to push preferred narratives. Georgia Falls Victim to Pipeline Politics is another one of those. That Georgia is a victim, there is no denying. And “pipeline politics” is one of the culprits. After all, not even President Saakashivili would have believed that the West would have his back in the event of a showdown with Russia if the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline and other projects to allow oil and gas from Central Asia to bypass Russian territory hadn’t existed and Western leaders hadn’t talked him up because of them. But this report has nothing about all that. It’s a (perfectly good) story about the projects and ideas and how they are likely to be affected negatively by the Russia-Georgia conflict. The victim in the article as written is pipeline politics, if anyone.