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Guardian 13.08.08
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20.../russia.georgia
One thing is for sure. This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags.
Georgia, a supposed western ally and applicant to Nato, has been treated by Russia to a brutal lesson in power politics. The west has lost all leverage and can do nothing. Seldom was a policy so crashingly stupid.
Putin would die laughing if he read this week's American newspapers. The president, George Bush, declared the Russian invasion of Georgia "disproportionate and unacceptable". This is taken as a put-down to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who declared the invasion "will not go unanswered", apparently something quite different. Bush says that great powers should not go about "toppling governments in the 21st century", as if he had never done such a thing. Cheney says that the invasion has "damaged Russia's standing in the world", as if Cheney gave a damn. The lobby for sanctions against Russia is reduced to threatening to boycott the winter Olympics. Big deal.
Every student of the Caucasus has known since the fall of the Soviet empire that this part of the world was an explosion waiting to happen. The crisscrossing fault lines of ethnicity, religion and nationalism, fuelled by gas and oil, would not long survive the removal of the Red Army and communist discipline. There were too many old scores to settle, too much territory in dispute and too much wealth at stake - rivalries brilliantly portrayed in Kurban Said's classic novel of Edwardian Azerbaijan, Ali & Nino.
In every crisis the west craves goodies and baddies. The media finds it impossible to report a modern conflict without taking sides. In Yugoslavia, where a similar clash of separatist minorities occurred in the 1990s, coverage was so biased that Kosovo is still "plucky little" and the Serbs can still do no right.
In South Ossetia both sides appear to have committed appalling atrocities, and can thus generate a sense of outrage in front of whatever camera is pointed at them. Georgia's government claimed the right to assert military control over its two dissident provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, even if they were openly in league with Russia. Equally, Russia felt justified in stopping the consequent evictions and killings of its nationals in these provinces, in which it had a humanitarian locus as "peacekeeper".
The difficulty is that entitlement and good sense are rarely in accord. Georgia may have been entitled to act, but was clearly unwise to do so. Russia may have been entitled to aid its people against an oppressor, but that is different from unleashing its notoriously inept and ruthless army, let alone bombing Georgia's capital and demanding a change in its government.
What is clear is that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is a poor advertisement for a Columbia University education. He thought he could reoccupy South Ossetia and call Russia's bluff while Putin was away at the Olympics. He found it was not bluff. Putin was waiting for just such an invitation to humiliate a man he loathes, and to deter any other Russian border state from applying to join Nato, an organisation Russia had itself sought to join until it was rudely rebuffed.
Saakashvili thought he could call on the support of his neoconservative allies in Washington. Tbilisi is one of the few world cities in which Bush's picture is a pin-up and where an avenue is named after him. It turned out that such "support" was mere words. America is otherwise engaged in wars that bear a marked resemblance to those waged by Putin. It defended the Kurdish enclaves against Saddam Hussein. It sought regime change in Serbia and Afghanistan. As Putin's troops in South Ossetia were staging a passable imitation of the US 101st Airborne entering Iraq, Bush was studiously watching beach volleyball in Beijing.
The truth is that the world has no conceptual framework for adjudicating, let alone resolving, these timeless border conflicts. Where poverty is rife, it takes only a clan war and a ready supply of guns for hostilities to break out. The only question is how to stop them escalating.
Once such conflicts could be quarantined by the United Nations' requirement to respect national sovereignty. That has been shot to pieces by the liberal interventionism of George Bush and Tony Blair. The result has reinvigorated separatist movements across the world. Small-statism is not an evil in itself: witness its quadrennial festival at the Olympics. But the process of achieving it is usually bitter and bloody.
The west's eagerness to intervene in favour of partition, manifest in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Sudan, is more than meddling. It encouraged every oppressed people and province on earth to be "the mouse that roared", to think it could ensnare a great power in its cause.
The parallels are glaring. If we backed Kosovo against the Serbs, why not back South Ossetia against the Georgians? But if we backed the Kurds against the Iraqis, why not the Georgians against Russia? Indeed, had Nato admitted Georgia to full membership, there is no knowing what Caucasian horror might have ensued from the resulting treaty obligation. Decisions which in Washington and London may seem casual gestures of ideological solidarity can mean peace and war on the ground.
I retain an archaic belief that the old UN principle of non-interference, coupled with a realpolitik acceptance of "great power" spheres of influence, is still a roughly stable basis for international relations. It may on occasions be qualified by soft-power diplomacy and humanitarian relief. It may demand an abstinence from kneejerk gestures in favour of leaving things to sort themselves out (as in Zimbabwe). But liberal interventionism, especially when it leads to military and economic aggression, means one costly adventure after another - and usually failure.
The west has done everything to isolate Putin, as he rides the tiger of Russian emergence from everlasting dictatorship. This has encouraged him to care not a fig for world opinion. Equally the west has encouraged Saakashvili to taunt Putin beyond endurance. The policy has led to war. If ever there were a place just to leave alone, it is surely the Caucasus.
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· This article was amended on Saturday August 16 2008. In common with much of the media we regularly describe the president of Georgia as the "Harvard-educated" Mikheil Saakashvili. He wasn't at Harvard: his degree is from Columbia University. The reference in this article has been corrected.
Turkish Daily News 14.08.08
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article...?enewsid=112513
What the Georgian leader did is really insane. No matter what the reason is and who has provoked him, provoking a big country like Russia is insane, pure and simple
Mensur AKGÜN
The young and ambitious leader of Georgia, Mikhael Saakashvili, dragged his country into a disaster. Uncalculated steps he took caused a break down in Georgia, a collapse of the country's fragile economy and the death of thousands. His adventurous spirit has become the end of his political career. Regardless of what Russians say or do, Saakashvili has no political future anymore.
Whom did he trust?
We can't know whom and what he did trust before attacking South Ossetia. But the statements he made reveal that the Georgian leader was expecting help from the United States to back him and his “revolutions” from NATO that he is looking forward to making Georgia a member and from the European Union with the hope that someday his country will have an accession to. Apparently he expected support beyond diplomatic and humanitarian help.
The 41-year-old Georgian leader has education in law first in Kiev and then in the universities of Columbia and George Washington in the United States, but he has failed to have a good grasp of world politics. Saakashvili trusted good will remarks from Washington who pushed him to the fore before he made such an adventurous attempt, or even an attempt of craziness.
What he did is really insane. No matter what the reason is and who has provoked him, this is insane, pure and simple. After all, you are attacking the peace force of a giant country right before your nose and hoping that this country will comply with this and tolerate what you are doing.
This is similar to possible attacks of Greek Cypriots against Turkish troops on the island and then expecting in return that Turkey will not retaliate. This is even more stupid because Greek Cypriots are EU members and even if they try such a thing, though I believe they never would, there could be something they can depend on. The worst could be that they could have diplomatic support of France.
Charisma-blind
But to whom does Georgia trust? Did Saakashvili think that U.S. President George W. Bush would sacrifice Washington and New York for him and engage in war with the Russians? Or did he think that the EU capitals would get in trouble with Russia just for the sake of his political ambitions? Or perhaps he thought that Turkey, selling arms to Georgia, would back him and end all its relations with Russia just for the Georgian nationalists.
Who knows, perhaps his charisma made him blind so he did not make any calculations at all and attacked a region harboring Russian troops and acting like an independent state since 1992. First of all, he is the one who used unproportional force, killed civilians and Russian soldiers.
Saakashvili's motive was to include the region in the Georgian territory but his intervention gave an opposite result. As of now, Georgia has been divided into three parts and there is a possibility that it could be split again to have four regions. There is no hope of integration and re-establishment of territorial integrity.
But if the Georgian leader had a bit of political experience, of diplomatic knowledge and a notion of history, he could've known that Russia would never tolerate such a fait accompli after a defeat in Kosovo and let a small country to step on it and that he could've better known that no country would rush to help him. He could've never dragged his country into such an adventure for nothing.
However, there are so many lessons for everyone to learn from Saakashvili's adventure. Turkish patriots and “strategists” should be the first to learn a lesson that regional issues cannot be resolved by applying force only. Of course Turkey is not Georgia, but we face the same threat. Turkey should resolve its all problems without even threatening to use force, or at least should try this.
Turkish politicians automatically approving each NATO enlargement and Turkish civilian-military bureaucracy not taking a position for the sake of being good to our neighbors should learn a second lesson.
If Georgia had become a NATO member, according to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, all members of the alliance, Turkey being the first, would've obliged to reach out to Georgia and provide assistance.
It was a good thing that a couple of NATO members opposed Georgian membership at the Bucharest summit in April and that the membership process did not begin. If it were, we could've been under heavy political responsibility, even if it was not for Article 5.
Lessons for Americans
Turkey, from now on, should think big and come up with ideas and policies for the Atlantic Alliance's future, since it is a member. To make an impromptu suggestion of a stability pact and to pronounce “alliance” rather than “pact” is not enough.
There are so many people and countries that could learn a lesson from the misadventures Saakashvili, but Americans top the list. I hope once they overcome the hysteria of reflecting their own mistakes onto Russia and of accusing Russia of everything, they will be able to think calmly and put the table where they made a mistake while developing an Atlantic vision for the Black Sea as they supporting Saakashvili.
………
Mensur Akgün is a columnist for daily Referans, where this piece appeared yesterday. It was translated into English by the TDN's staff.
The Independent 15.08.08
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...kid-897498.html
As Russian forces started to hand over control of the Georgian town of Gori yesterday, you could detect a note of surprise, even disappointment, in many media reports. So the all-out Russian invasion of plucky little democratic Georgia might not be going to happen after all. Could it be that the bear was drawing in his claws?
Well, Russia did not have long to worry about losing its reputation as backyard bully. Within hours, the United States envoy to Georgia was spinning a whole new myth to the BBC about how it was only decisive US intervention – by which he presumably meant the warplanes laden with humanitarian aid by then ostentatiously parked at Tbilisi airport – that the mighty erstwhile Red Army had been turned back.
The many Georgians who had counted on more timely and robust assistance from their US protector surely laughed a bitter laugh. But there were signs, with the arrival of the US Secretary of State in Georgia, that this version was gaining hold. The story of this war, it seems, will be that the US faced down a snarling, expansionist Russia, and forced it to limp back to its lair.
This is a travesty. But it is only the latest and most glaring in a series of Western misrepresentations and misreadings of Russian intentions throughout this sorry episode. They began with the repeated references to Russian "aggression" and "invasion", continued through charges of intended "regime change", and culminated in alarmist reports about Russian efforts to bomb the east-west energy pipeline. None of this, not one bit of it, is true.
Take "aggression" and "invasion". Georgia declared itself to be in a state of war with Russia. War, regrettably, is war, and a basic objective is to reduce, or destroy, the enemy's military capability. This is what Russia was doing until it accepted the ceasefire. The positions it took up inside Georgia proper can be seen as defensive, not offensive. Gori houses the Georgian garrison on South Ossetia's border.
And anyway, how did hostilities begin? Georgia sent troops into South Ossetia. The status of that region – which declared unilateral independence – is anomalous. It is inside Georgia's borders, but outside its control. But one reason why the dispute has not been solved is that the "fudge" over independence brought with it a degree of stability. Georgia's action upset that stability. But did anyone describe it as "aggression"? Trying to explain Russian "aggression", many reports went further, observing a "new" mood of Russian aggressive nationalism. Today's Russia, they reasoned, was uniquely liable to lash out, because energy wealth had fuelled new national ambitions. Where, though, is the evidence that Russian national pride is automatically malign?
If you exclude Chechnya, which Russians have always regarded as part of Russia, then neither Putin, nor Medvedev, had sent troops outside Russian borders before this point. As for the idea that Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union – derived from his remark about the Soviet collapse being "among the greatest catastrophes" of the 20th century – nothing could be further from what he did. Far from hankering after a lost empire, Putin used his years as president systematically to fix Russia's post-Soviet borders, signing treaties with every neighbouring country that would agree – including, last month, China. Of course, Russia does not like the idea of another Nato member on its borders. But this is not the same as wanting to restore "ex-Soviet space". It reflects Russia's view of its legitimate security interests.
Perhaps the most pernicious assumption over the past week, however, is that Russia wanted to effect "regime-change". Russian officials categorically denied this, insisting that they had no business overthrowing an elected leader. You might scoff, but Russia has done nothing that would contradict this. The Kremlin would probably be delighted if Georgians eventually punished their President for his misguided enterprise, but Russia seems to accept that Georgians decide what happens in Georgia.
Why was it so difficult for outsiders to believe that Moscow wanted precisely what its leaders said they wanted: a return to the situation that had pertained before Georgia's incursion into South Ossetia – and does it matter that its intentions were so appallingly misread? Yes it does. If outsiders impute to Moscow motives and objectives it does not have, they alienate Russia even further, and make a long-term solution of many international problems that more difficult. It is high time we treated Russia's post-Soviet leaders as responsible adults representing a legitimate national interest, rather than assuming the stereotypical worst.
[email protected]
The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0815/p09s01-coop.html
Boston - Poke a bear often enough and you're likely to get bitten. As the crisis over Georgia continues, this describes where the West finds itself today in its relations with Russia.
Amid conflicting reports of Russia's commitment to a cease-fire, one thing is clear: Moscow scored a crushing geopolitical victory this week. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that the US must choose between a "virtual project" with Georgia, or a real partnership with Russia.
After days of evident disarray, only now is the West cobbling together a response: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Georgia in a symbolic show of support, US Air Force cargo jets are delivering small amounts of humanitarian aid, and NATO ministers will meet Tuesday to consider the crisis. When they do, they should remember how we got to this point.
The cold war's end nearly two decades ago left Russia badly weakened. Adhering to the iron laws of politics, the West immediately set out to exploit its advantage.
NATO, a military alliance founded to contain Soviet power, embarked upon an aggressive program of eastward enlargement, incorporating into its ranks former Soviet satellites such as Hungary and Poland and former Soviet republics such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Although the Kremlin objected vociferously, the West ignored these protests.
During the 1990s, NATO also redefined its purpose. In the phrase of the day, the alliance needed either to "go out of area" or "go out of business." Going out of area meant refashioning itself into an instrument of intervention, an impulse that found expression in 1999 when the alliance launched a war against Serbia on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians. Russia, self-assigned protector of the Slavs, protested. The West gave the Kremlin the back of its hand.
In the present decade, concerned about protecting Europe from a missile attack by Iran, the Bush administration is intent on installing a sophisticated antimissile radar system in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland. The Kremlin, suspecting that the defenses are directed against Russia as well, objected. Once again, the West disregarded Russian protests.
Today Russia is no longer weak. In the age of Vladimir Putin – still the prime mover as prime minister under President Dmitri Medvedev – it is no longer willing to play the patsy. Through its incursion into Georgia, a US friend that has eagerly sought to become NATO's newest member, the Kremlin sends a signal to the West: This far and no further. Russia will not tolerate any more Western intrusions into what it considers its rightful sphere of influence.
After a long run of losing hands, Russia will likely take this trick. The West, especially Europe, needs Russian oil and gas and is no position to impose sanctions that have any bite. Furthermore, even if NATO were inclined to ride to Georgia's rescue, it lacks the ability to do so. Paradoxically, as the alliance expanded geographically and went out of area, it also shed military capacity. NATO forces already have their hands full, fighting Taliban guerrillas in faraway Afghanistan. The once-formidable alliance is tapped out: there's nothing left to divert to the Caucasus, or anywhere else for that matter.
As the old saying goes: The sky grows dark with chickens coming home to roost. Russia's brutal treatment of Georgia is payback for the West's disdainful treatment of Russia back when it was prostrate. Western weakness in responding to this challenge reflects the folly of allowing NATO to lose sight of its core mission, which is to protect Europe, not pacify Central Asia. Meanwhile, the Bush administration, despite America's vaunted military power, can do little more than protest, remonstrate, and offer Georgia symbolic assistance. Still trying to extricate itself from the quagmire of Iraq, the US already has more than enough military commitments to keep itself busy.
Does all of this signify a return to the 1930s, when totalitarian dictators got away with swallowing up small states, thereby setting the stage for a far-larger disaster? No, not if the West behaves sensibly, at least.
Russia is not our friend, but it need not be our enemy. The Kremlin's ambitions are not ideological but imperial. Putin is not a totalitarian; he is a nationalist, intent on ensuring that Russia be treated with respect and, within the area defining its "near abroad," even deference. Yet beyond its immediate neighborhood the danger posed by a resurgent Russia is a limited one, in no way comparable to the threat once posed by the Soviet Union. When it comes to projecting power, today's Russian Army is a shadow of yesterday's Red Army.
The chief lesson of the Georgian crisis is this: The post-cold war holiday from history during which Europe took its security for granted has now ended. NATO's eastward march at Russia's expense has reached its limits. Enlarging the alliance further by incorporating Georgia or even Ukraine as member states will entail costs likely to be prohibitive.
The priority facing the West – and especially the major European powers – is to get serious about repairing its defenses. That means reorienting and rebuilding NATO. An alliance able to defend its frontiers and manifestly intent on doing so will have little to fear from Putin's Russia. The West's response to a Russia that has flexed its muscles in Georgia needs to be unambiguous: This far and no further.
• Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," has just been published.
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