SubscribeIt is these circumstances that dictate the steps we will take now. We will not allow the deaths of our fellow citizens to go unpunished. The perpetrators will receive the punishment they deserve.Georgian politicians say 'this means war'.
Who started it? — Looks like Georgia. The sniping earlier came from both sides, but the Georgians have clearly launched a major ground offensive, and that doesn’t just happen by accident.The International Crisis Group has some background information on Georgia, including a useful map. Georgia Conflict Alert: The Need for an Immediate End to Hostilities in South Ossetia.
Why? — What follows is a mishmash of guesses. Take it with a big grain of salt.
South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital) and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.
That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.
So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.
So, is it working? — It’s too early to tell, but it’s not looking good. There’s not much solid information, but it appears that (1) the Georgians don’t have firm control of Tsikhinvali yet; (2) they don’t seem to be anywhere close to the tunnel; (3) the Russians have reacted with unexpected speed and energy, so that Russian troops are already on the ground in the province, and (4) the Russians have grabbed control of South Ossetia’s airspace. Things are still fluid, but it’s not looking good for the Georgians.
(Saakashvili’s actions this afternoon seem to reflect this. He’s visibly shaken, and he’s been yelling for help from the US and the EU. That’s not going to happen.)
This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.Considering that Georgia is already crying uncle, we can most probably say that no, it didn't work.
So, is it working? — It’s too early to tell, but it’s not looking good.
In the thirteenth century, Ossetians arrived on the south side of the Caucasus Mountains, in Georgian territory, when the Mongols drove them from what is now the North Ossetian Autonomous Republic of Russia.^The Mongols started it! I should've known. Pesky world conquerors.
In the Balkans, the west promoted the disintegration of multiethnic Yugoslavia, climaxing with their recognition of Kosovo's independence in February. If a mafia-dominated microstate like Montenegro can get western recognition, why shouldn't flawed, pro-Russian, unrecognised states aspire to independence, too?
Saakashvili just didn’t think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. This is a place smaller than some incorporated Central Valley towns, but it declared itself an “autonomous” republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they’d die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they’re never going to change. The Ajarans aren’t even ethnically different from Georgians; they’re Georgian too. But they’re Muslims, which means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that Victorian crap, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze (Goddamn Georgian names!) volunteered them to fight to the death for their worthless independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little “country” was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colussus to the North, mighty Georgia.
Well, like I’ve said before, there’s nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region—like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting—like the fact that South Ossetia isn’t Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border.
The invasion was backed up by a PR offensive so layered and sophisticated that I even got an hysterical call today from a hedge fund manager in New York, screaming about an "investor call" that Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze made this morning with some fifty leading Western investment bank managers and analysts. I've since seen a J.P. Morgan summary of the conference call, which pretty much reflects the talking points later picked up by the US media.The Ames article also has a critique of McCain's position on Georgia and the under-reported fact that the Security Council (i.e., the US and Britain) "backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides 'to renounce the use of force,' council diplomats said." (citing a Reuters report). Got that? Georgia refused a cease-fire because it required the renunciation of force. But the talking points have Georgia demanding a cease-fire and the Russians continuing their "offensive".
These kinds of conference calls are generally conducted by the heads of companies in order to give banking analysts guidance. But as the hedge fund manager told me today, "The reason Lado did this is because he knew the enormous PR value that Georgia would gain by going to the money people and analysts, particularly since Georgia is clearly the aggressor this time." As a former investment banker who worked in London and who used to head the Bank of Georgia, Gurgenidze knew what he was doing. "Lado is a former banker himself, so he knew that by framing the conflict for the most influential bankers and analysts in New York, that these power bankers would then write up reports and go on CNBC and argue Lado Gurgenidze's talking points. It was brilliant, and now you're starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it's Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia."
Saakashvili’s bet — perhaps with tacit U.S. encouragement — might have been to reclaim South Ossetia by force, if Russia did not get involved militarily. Another strategy may have been to provoke Moscow to respond militarily and then retreat under Russian fire, claiming an act of aggression against Georgia. In either case, it seems that Saakashvili’s intention was to bolster his domestic support by appearing strong and standing up to the Russian bear, while making a serious move to restore Georgia’s sovereignty over South Ossetia. He achieved most of his objectives. It was a win-win for Saakashvili and a perfect trap for Medvedev.
If Russia one day recognises Abkhazia's independence without Georgian consent and Security Council approval, it will mean that Moscow has finally lost its faith in international law and accepted that the world has reverted to jungle.
The Bush Administration's ambition to extend Nato into the Caucasus mountains is dead, which will please the French, the Germans and other Nato members who always found it bizarre and wilfully provocative.With George around to mess things up, one can only hope..
Russians, who were the target of the provocation, will be quietly pleased with the speed and effectiveness of their Government's response. There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn't strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend. There is no great strategic issue either: apart from a few pipeline routes, the whole Transcaucasus is of little importance to the rest of the world.
In six months' time, we probably won't even remember this foolish adventure.
I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation. And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that "the men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities' hem as a child to the mother's gown." And whenever they walk "by roaring streets unknown" they remember their native city "most faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond." And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon...
The current mess arose almost 20 years ago when South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which had been rolled into Georgia but given self-governing status by Stalin, began talking about complete independence as the Soviet Union stumbled towards collapse in 1990. The first post-Communist Georgian leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, replied by suppressing their autonomy entirely.I must admit, I still find it hard to believe U.S. officials can keep a straight face while blustering about violation of international rules and a country's sovereignty and "this will not stand." Respectively: Kosovo, Iraq, and what exactly are you going to do about it?
When the South Ossetians and Abkhaz revolted against this, Georgian troops were sent in to crush them but proved unable to do so. Several thousand people were killed, far larger numbers became refugees, and the quarrels ended up as two of the "frozen conflicts" around the fringes of the former Soviet Union, patrolled by Russian and Georgian peace-keeping troops.
Nothing much changed until the "Rose Revolution" that brought Mikhail Saakashvili to power five years ago promising to reintegrate the lost districts into Georgia. The Bush administration saw an opportunity to create a military foothold on Russia's southern border, and began supplying Saakashvili with military equipment and training for his forces. Which brings us, fairly directly, to today.
After the Soviet Union fell apart and Georgia became an independent state, Mr. Saakashvili received a U.S.-government sponsored fellowship to continue his law studies at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1994.He later split with Shevardnadze, was backed by George Soros and the US, and led the "Rose Revolution" in 2003 which inspired similar people-power movements in Ukraine and Kyrgyztan.
While in New York, he did exactly what the U.S. State Department had hoped when it sent him and thousands of other young students from the former Soviet Union to schools in the U.S: He fell in love with America.
He initially intended on settling in New York and practising law, but in 1995 he was personally headhunted by Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who was looking to surround himself with talented young Georgians unhindered by old ideas. Mr. Saakashvili came home and, at just 26, was elected to parliament, along with Zhurab Zhvania and Nino Burdjanadze, two other young Georgians recruited to the cause. The young lawyer quickly made a name for himself as an anti-corruption campaigner and within five years his mentor made him justice minister.
During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.This kind of empty rhetoric is a perennial problem in US foreign policy. Contrast with George H. W. Bush's "Chicken Kiev" speech in 1991, urging Ukraine to go slow in seeking independence: Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local depotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred. Of course US public opinion wasn't impressed by such caution, no matter how well-founded.
But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. “I’m going to visit a friend and I don’t expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend,” she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.
... back in 1949, the alliance was formed with a central tenet of collective defense. The famous Article 5 of the NATO Charter stipulates that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all, a principle that assured Western Europe during the cold war that America would come to its defense if Moscow encroached.Back when NATO was proposed, the State Department's Policy Planning Staff cautioned against extending NATO beyond the Atlantic area:
But the notion of collective defense is a more complicated matter now that NATO has expanded to include 26 countries, foreign policy experts said, including former Soviet republics like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, not to mention the Czech Republic and Poland. Although some said that NATO might at least try to rustle up a defense for those countries if they were attacked, the concept of collective defense falls apart completely in the case of Georgia and Ukraine — both smack in Russia’s backyard and sphere of influence — even if they were NATO members.
... it is doubtful that the United States, its military stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, would go to war with Russia to defend Georgia even if it were a member of NATO, said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company.
“The assumption that everybody made was that a mere guarantee by NATO would preclude any threat because the Russians would never dare displease NATO or the United States,” he said. Except now, he said, Russia has called the West’s bluff.
The Policy Planning Staff is of the opinion that the scope of a pact of this sort should be restricted to the North Atlantic area itself, and that attempts to go further afield and to include countries beyond that area might have undesirable consequences.JCS 1769/1 explains the rationale for guaranteeing the security of the Atlantic nations:
In the first place, the admission of any single country beyond the North Atlantic area would be taken by others as constituting a precedent, and would almost certainly lead to a series of demands from states still further afield that they be similarly treated. Failure on our part to satisfy these further demands would then be interpreted as lack of interest in the respective countries, and as evidence that we had "written them off" to the Russians. Beyond the Atlantic area, which is a clean-cut concept, and which embraces a real community of defense interest firmly rooted in geography and tradition, there is no logical stopping point....
To get carried into any such wide system of alliances could lead only to one of two results; either all these alliances become meaningless declarations, after the pattern of the Kellogg Pact, and join the long array of dead-letter pronouncements through which governments have professed their devotion to peace in the past; or this country becomes still further over-extended, politically and militarily.
In the case of an ideological war the most vulnerable side of our defense area will be in the Atlantic. Also, unless we can retain allies on the eastern side of the Atlantic strong enough, in the event of an ideological war, to hold the Soviets away from the eastern shores of the Atlantic, the shortest and most direct avenue of attack against our enemies will almost certainly be denied to us. Further, almost all potentially strong nations who can reasonably be expected to ally themselves with the United States in such a war are situated in western Europe. Moreover, two world wars in the past thirty years have demonstrated the interdependence of France, Great Britain and the United States in case of war with central or eastern European powers. In war these nations not only need one another but are in mortal peril if they do not combine their forces. In the past war it was demonstrated that France could not stand without Great Britain and that when France fell the British Isles were in mortal peril. If Britain had fallen, the Western Hemisphere would have been completely exposed, and the United States would have had to defend itself in the Atlantic before it could have thought of resisting the Japanese conquest of China, the East Indies, the Philippines and the Far Pacific. That the defense of the United States and Canada in North America and of Great Britain and France in western Europe is inseparable from the combined defense of them all is not a question of what men think now, but is something that has been demonstrated by what we have had to do, though tardily, and therefore at greater risk and cost, in actual warfare in the past.
Our story begins at the end of the last Cold War, when the former Soviet satellites of the Warsaw Pact were freed from their bondage to Moscow and immediately began looking West for protection from a future resurgence of Russian power. They all clamored for admission to the NATO club, the sooner the better. Given their history, who can blame them?
But the realists of the first Bush Administration looked upon this idea with all the enthusiasm of an experienced hunter asked to take care of some lost bear cubs. Mama Bear might not be around now, but when she shows up, you know there’s going to be trouble. Indeed, the Russians later claimed that Bush and Baker had promised them, at the time of Germany’s reunification, that NATO would not be pushed any further east than the Oder River (Germany’s border with Poland). I don’t know if this is true, but the Russians seem to believe it.
Not for the last time, though, the incoming Clinton team showed itself more susceptible to interventionist impulses and began pushing for NATO expansion – with, it should be added, the enthusiastic support of most of our European allies, who saw expansion both as a safeguard against Russian revival and a way to keep the US engaged in European affairs. (It’s hard to remember now that the big worry back then was that the US would disengage from the world, instead of trying to dominate it.)
On the street in Tskhinvali, small changes began to appear.
Ms. Alborova’s aunt was exasperated to go to the store and see that pasta manufactured in Russia had been put in packages labeled with Georgian script. Her neighbor Emma Gasiyeva kept hearing slogans: “Brush them out with a broom!” and “Who are the guests, and who are the hosts?” a reference to the theory that Ossetians had been brought to the area as agricultural workers.
In 1989, Ms. Alborova was 15, and she saw only shadows. She heard that her Georgian classmates were gathering for some kind of meeting, but she was not invited. “They stopped talking to us,” she said of her Georgian neighbors. “It was done very quickly.”
Over the next three years, Tskhinvali became something like Belfast in Northern Ireland....
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posted by sonic meat machine at 8:01 AM on August 8, 2008