by Jules Evans | Aug 11, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
This is the perspective from my Russian friend, Konstantin, with whom I have had many a foreign policy discussion in the bars of Moscow. He is an educated, well-travelled Russian and I would say his view is in some ways quite typical of the Russian middle class.
My opinion has formed up long ago. There is no international law, there is only power. It was, it is, and it will be until the golden age of enlightenment. For that, I am not outraged or surprised by the US/UK position. It was to be expected. Georgia has no power to get the provinces back – so, Saakashvili should have sat still. It is stupid to pick at Russians now saying that it is de jure Georgian territory… Saakashvili was shelling the capital of South Ossetia for one and a half days, and levelled it to the ground. That’s it.
I strongly respect Americans in this way, and am deeply concerned about the readiness of our troops to wage conventional war. The US military is very effecient – bombs, bombs, bombs on “civilian areas of Belgrade” – and the war is over. and Russians? More than 20 russian soldiers have been killed, a thousand russian citizens murdered – and we are talking about a ceasefire. During the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, the Nato losses were ZERO.
I would refer you also to the speech of the Russian UN representative, Vitaly Churkin. I think his position is quite reasonable http://www.un.org/webcast/sc.html
There was an amusing moment when Khalilzad [US ambassador to UN] produced a paper with the print-out of a telephone conversation between Condoleeza Rice and [Russian foreign minister] Lavrov where Lavrov said that “Saakashvili must quit”. Khalilzad was pressing this point when Churkin said “I am glad you publicize confidential information of our foreign ministers…” And during the press-conference the reporters were shelling him with this question, if Russians want to overthrow the democratically elected president, and Churkin said “I do not practice overhearing my boss’s converstions”.
Again, I have lost all, I repeat, all respect for the West coalition. It is all clear with the US. But the UK! Miliband looks to me like Tabaqui the jackal following after Shere Khan, the role the Georgian envoy was playing masterfully in the UK. But the UK is not Georgia, it must be shameful for them to follow in every US step. The British establishment generally is as despicable and decadent as the Russian. Reprimanding Russian moguls, while selling them family castles, selling them “Britishness”. Truly, if David Miliband represents the new generation of British diplomats, this is very sad.
“Do not forget that we are a small grey donkey between the bear and eagle” W. Churchill. It is true that the bear is lame, and maybe will never recover, but one must not behave like a donkey.
To sum it all up. I do not care at all what the West says, they lost all credibility, authority and respect. Russians are not angels either. Anyway, why did Serbia let Kosovo go? Because they were not strong enough. Why did Russia manage to suppress Chechnya? It was just bigger and more powerful. Human rights aspect is another issue.
So, it is my sacred dream to manage to free myself from the state’s influence and lead the life I choose, and live with the people I choose and respect. I saw many wonderful and reasonable people in America and Britain. I am sure there are a lot of them. But what the establishment is doing is above my understanding…
by Alex Evans | Aug 11, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Daniel may well be right that “The German and French governments need to reflect on how their veto of Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest Summit in April encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili to take unilateral military action, believing nobody else would help him recover territory belonging to Georgia” – but it also leaves open the question, what if Georgia had become a NATO member?
This is undoubtedly the question that Georgians are asking themselves this weekend, as the NYT’s Andrew Kramer is discovering in Gori:
One soldier, his face a mask of exhaustion, cradled a Kalashnikov. “We killed as many of them as we could,” he said. “But where are our friends?” It was the question of the day. As Russian forces massed Sunday on two fronts, Georgians were heading south with whatever they could carry. When they met Western journalists, they all said the same thing: Where is the United States? When is NATO coming?
But if one scenario is that Georgia’s non-membership of NATO encouraged Saakashvili to take unilateral action, an alternative one is that membership itself might also have emboldened Georgia’s leader to go on the attack. As John Lewis Gaddis recounts in The Cold War, the history of the last 60 years is full of instances in which tails wagged dogs as a result of great powers’ alliances. One of the examples he offers is South Korea just prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, where
The South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, repeatedly sought support for his amibitions to liberate the north from officials in Washington as well as from General Douglas MacArthur … but he never got it. One of the reasons the Americans withdrew their troops from South Korea, indeed, was their fear that the unpredictable Rhee might “march north,” and thus drag them into a war they did not want.
Another case, he suggests, is the Chinese-Taiwanese dispute over offshore islands in 1954-55 and 1958, which looked at points as if it could drag the US and Russia towards a nuclear war.
No one in either Washington or Moscow had instigated these events … nor did any American or Soviet leader think the offshore islands were worth a war in which nuclear weapons might be used. They were, however, unable to avoid threatening each other with just such a result, because the lacked the means of controlling their own ‘allies’.
But the example par excellence, he continues, is Vietnam:
By the beginning of the 1960s [Ngo Dinh Diem’s] South Vietnamese government had become an embarrassment to the Americans … Aware that Washington’s credibility was on the line once again, Diem – following the example of Rhee and Chiang – warned that his regime might collapse if the Americans failed to increase their support for it. “We still have to find the technique,” Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow commented in 1961, “for bringing our great bargaining power to bear on leaders of client states to do things they ought to do but don’t want to do”.
In fairness, one can equally well argue that if Georgia were a member of NATO, then this would have caused Russia to reconsider its decision to surge beyond the South Ossetian border and into Georgia proper. It’s an imponderable that will doubtless be discussed for a long time to come – but I suspect that people who opposed NATO membership for Georgia may well feel vindicated by Saakashvili’s subsequent actions.
by Daniel Korski | Aug 10, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
Now that the Russo-Georgian War is coming to an end, hopefully the Georgian authorities will review the steps that led to the confrontation, and its military set-backs.
No doubt Russia should be blamed for wanting to dismember Georgia and perhaps even topple its president. The U.S should consider how its forthright support led the Tblisi government down a dead-end road. The German and French governments need to reflect on how their veto of Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest Summit in April encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili to take unilateral military action, believing nobody else would help him recover territory belonging to Georgia. And the EU as a whole needs to consider how its inaction – and head-in-the-sand policy – made a bad situation worse.
But above all, the Georgian government needs to look at its own strategic and military miscalculations. Once the ceasefire takes effect, I hope that Georgia will show itself to be a true democracy with citizens demanding that an investigation be conducted into the war much like the Agranat Commission investigated the Israeli government’s actions during the Yom Kippur War. It’s what a real democracy does.
by Alex Evans | Aug 10, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Taking a quick tally of where some of my favourite US blogs stack up on the Russian / Georgian conflict, there are some interesting perspectives. Steve Clemons at the Washington Note is in forceful mood:
The U.S. has displayed a reckless disregard for Russian interests for some time. I don’t like Russia’s swing to greater domestic authoritarianism and worry about its stiffened posture on a number of international fronts — but [Nixon Center President Dimitri] Simes convinces me in his important Foreign Affairs essay, “Losing Russia,” that much of what we are seeing unfold between Russia and Georgia involves a high quotient of American culpability.
When Kosovo declared independence and the US and other European states recognized it — thus sidestepping Russia’s veto in the United Nations Security Council — many of us believed that the price for Russian cooperation in other major global problems just went much higher and that the chance of a clash over Georgia’s breakaway border provinces increased dramatically…
At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time — and tie to it some process of independence for the two autonomous Georgia provinces. In exchange, Russia would not veto the creation of a new state of Kosovo at the Security Council. The U.S. rejected Russia’s secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.
Now thousands are dead. The fact is that a combination of American recklessness, serious miscalculation and over-reach by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as Russia’s forceful reassertion of its regional national interests and status as an oil and gas rich, tough international player means America and Europe have yet again helped generate a crisis that tests US global credibility.
Greg Djerejian – making a welcome return to regular posting on his site the Belgravia Dispatch – more or less agrees:
First, let us disabuse ourselves from the notion that Mr. Saakashvili is some glorious democrat (the election he barely won in January included irregularities, and there continues to be endemic corruption in Tblisi).
Second, let us recall that many south Ossetians and Abkhazians are not particularly keen to live under Tbilisi’s yoke, indeed some prefer Russian influence to predominate there for the time being.
Third, if there is any truth to Russian allegations that there are some 1,500 fatalities in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali–and they were caused by a major initial over-reach by the Georgian military (we will need to wait for more details to emerge)–expect many more brutish bombardments like the Russians apparently have conducted in the Georgian town of Gori, alas.
Fourth, some context: ever since the overly hasty recognition of Kosovo went live, Putin has been very keen to intimate what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, having personally threatened Saakashvili that Russia would formally recognize as independent states Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Meanwhile, Ben Smith at Politico notes that the sudden outbreak of conflict presented McCain and Obama with “a true ‘3am moment'”, and furthermore that “their responses to the crisis suggested dramatic differences in how each candidate, as president, would lead America in moments of international crisis”:
Obama’s statement put him in line with the White House, the European Union, NATO and a series of European powers, while McCain’s initial statement – which he delivered in Iowa and ran on a blog on his Web site under the title “McCain Statement on Russian Invasion of Georgia” – put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term.
A McCain adviser suggested that Obama’s statement constituted appeasement, while Obama’s camp suggested that McCain was being needlessly belligerent and dangerously quick to judge a complicated situation.
Finally, lots of praise all over for James Traub’s excellent backgrounder in yesterday’s New York Times, which provides a wealth of historical context. One angle that jumped out was the pipeline politics dimension (about which I blogged on Friday):
Marshall Goldman, a leading Russia scholar, argues in a recent book that Mr. Putin has established a “petrostate,” in which oil and gas are strategically deployed as punishments, rewards and threats. The author details the lengths to which Mr. Putin has gone to retain control over the delivery of natural gas from Central Asia to the West. A proposed alternative pipeline would skirt Russia and run through Georgia, as an oil pipeline [i.e. the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline] now does. “If Georgia collapses in turmoil,” Mr. Goldman notes, “investors will not put up the money for a bypass pipeline.”
by Alex Evans | Aug 10, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, South Asia
In an age when media coverage is such a significant dimension of armed conflict, the question of who’s cast as the goodie and who’s the baddie is not a small one. So who’s winning the narrative high ground over South Ossetia?
Until the fighting began, the answer – in western Europe and the US, at least – would clearly have been Georgia. Look at the regular stories over the past few months of Russian sabre-rattling towards Georgia, including YouTube footage that seems to show Russian fighters downing a Georgian UAV.
Those stories dovetailed perfectly with a growing mood of suspicion towards Russia on many fronts; as Jules’s post on Friday observed, the image of Russian tanks rolling in to South Ossetia immediately prompted “dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin”.
But a couple of pieces of commentary over the weekend suggest a growing backlash against Mikheil Saakashvili among the centre left European commentariat. In Saturday’s Guardian, Mark Almond tersely dismisses the idea of “plucky little Georgia” standing up to the Russian leviathan: “the cold war reading won’t wash”, he says. Instead, he argues, the conflict in South Ossetia
…has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain’s widely unexpected military response with the comment: “No great power retreats for ever.” Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev …
Anyone familiar with the Caucasus knows that the state bleating about its victim status at the hands of a bigger neighbour can be just as nasty to its smaller subjects. Small nationalisms are rarely sweet-natured …
Thomas de Waal, writing in today’s Observer, agrees. While Russia is behaving badly, he says, the same’s true of Georgia too:
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about [South Ossetians] than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law …
Saakashvili is a famously volatile risk-taker, veering between warmonger and peacemaker, democrat and autocrat. On several occasions international officials have pulled him back from the brink. On a visit to Washington in 2004, he received a tongue-lashing from then Secretary of State Colin Powell who told him to act with restraint. Two months ago, he could have triggered a war with his other breakaway province of Abkhazia by calling for the expulsion of Russian peacekeepers from there, but European diplomats persuaded him to step back. This time he has yielded to provocation and stepped over the precipice.
The provocation is real, but the Georgian President is rash to believe this is a war he can win or that the West wants it. Both George Bush and John McCain have visited Georgia, made glowing speeches praising Saakashvili and were rewarded with the Order of St George. But Bush, at least in public, is now bound to be cautious, calling for a ceasefire.
The reaction in much of Europe will be much less forgiving. Even before this crisis, a number of governments, notably France and Germany, were reporting ‘Georgia fatigue’. Though they broadly wished the Saakashvili government well, they did not buy the line that he was a model democrat – the sight last November of his riot police tear-gassing protesters in Tbilisi and smashing up an opposition TV station dispelled that illusion. And they have a long agenda of issues with Russia, which they regard as more important than the post-Soviet quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi. Paris and Berlin will now say they were right to urge caution on Georgia’s Nato ambitions at the Bucharest Nato summit.
