Cold War returns via Georgia
August 11, 2008
For some time the US has been priming Georgia for a provocative confrontation with Russia. Israeli and US military ‘advisers’ have been training and equipping the Georgian military. The US has been trying to bring it into NATO. Its military expenditures have shot through the roof. It is also the route for the long-in-planning Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. All in all, a useful foothold for the US in the Russian sphere of influence. And then strikes disaster.
Through a miscalculation worthy of Saddam Hussein, Georgia sends troops into the breakaway South Ossetia to reclaim territory. The Russians, who have been waiting for an excuse to dampen Georgian ambitions, send the still formidable remains of the old red army marching in with characteristic brutality. Georgians beat a hasty retreat, and now have Russian tanks advancing on their own territory. Now, Col (ret.) Sam Gardiner reports, tactical nukes have been thrown into the equation. All in all, a situation more explosive than the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gardiner argues.
Besides Gardiner’s report, here are a couple of useful commentaries to bring you up to speed. First is Laura Rozen’s interview with former CIA station chief Milt Bearden:
In Escalating Russian-Georgian Conflict, the Cold War is Back
As Russia stepped up attacks against Georgian moves to reassert control over the breakaway pro-Russian province of South Ossetia, and many civilians were reported killed and thousands displaced, I asked former deputy director of the CIA’s Soviet and East Europe division Milt Bearden why Russia and Georgia had chosen to escalate their long simmering dispute over South Ossetia now.
“As far as Russia goes, it’s easy: They’re baaack!” Bearden said. “And the Russians are doing what comes naturally to them in their new mood. They know the Europeans don’t want a face-off with Russia/Gazprom. They know the U.S. is so preoccupied with its own self inflicted disasters that it can do nothing but wring it hands. So why not now? It also would seem to stop NATO enlargement in its tracks. Just imagine Georgia inside NATO, and protected under Article 5!!”
“The US is helpless and Europe won’t touch this,” Bearden added. “Russia is feeling its oats. And yes, Georgia is George Bush’s beacon for liberty in the Caucasus. What’s he going to do? The Russians know one thing: how to count the cards. They know that not one of these chickens” will do anything.
I asked Bearden why pro-Western Georgia would have moved now to reassert control over South Ossetia, which at least in part seemed to provoke the Russian invasion. Was Georgia led to believe that the West would come to its aid in a military dispute with Moscow?
Bearden said it was pure miscalculation on Georgia’s part. “Almost every conflict in the region begins with a huge miscalculation by one or more parties. The Georgians are fully capable of this miscalculation. They believed they were going to hear the bugles coming over the hill. They are not going to hear anything.”
Update: Check out this Washington Post account of a UN emergency meeting on the Georgian crisis the US called yesterday. The US accused Russia of demanding in a confidential conversation with US Secretary of State Rice the removal of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. And the Russians? Russian envoy Vitaly “Churkin accused the United States of aiding and abetting Saakashvili, saying more than 100 U.S. advisers were providing training to Georgian forces on the eve of their military offensive against South Ossetia, and suggested that U.S. officials may have given Georgia the ‘green light’ to strike.” Did the US give Georgia the green light to strike?
Meantime, Georgians on the run question the Bush administration’s lofty rhetoric. “Where are our friends?” one retreating Georgian soldier told the Times. Former Clinton foreign policy hands Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus weigh in here.
And here is Philip Weiss exploring the Israeli angle.
The Israelis are said to be on the Georgians’ side… Debkafile, a site with Israeli intelligence sources, reports that Israeli advisers are aiding the Georgians to hold on to the breakaway provinces. 1000 advisers, says this site. The JPost headlines its report on Israelis’ views of the battle: South Ossetia is Georgia’s “Golan Heights:–and the Russians/Syrians want to take it away from us…
Haaretz reports the internationalist connection: a “Jewish Georgian minister” –of “reintegration.” And just in case you had any doubt, there’s also a neocon connection: McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann (a former board member of the Project for the New American Century) worked for the Georgian government. In the Note, Steve Clemons says that reckless U.S. internationalists have pushed the war, much as they’ve pushed adventures in the Middle East.
The Times also makes the Israel/Palestine analogy in this piece by Jim Traub, who had the foresight to visit Georgia a few weeks ago, and go to the breakaway region of Abkhazia–another South Ossetia:
Talking to the Georgians about Abkhazia, and the Abkhaz about Georgia, was like shuttling between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Georgians said that they were “always there,” that Abkhazia was a Georgian kingdom, and that only by expelling the ethnic Georgians at the end of the war did the Abkhaz make themselves a majority in the province. The Abkhaz said that they are the descendants of a “1,000-year-old kingdom,” that they were the victims of a massive campaign of Russian deportation in the 1860s, and then that Stalin forced them into the Georgian yoke. The Abkhaz talk about the Georgians pretty much the same way that the Georgians talk about the Russians… For the Abkhaz, as for the Ossetians, Georgia is the neighborhood bully.George Bush showed us the major difference between the two territorial disputes: Despite all the fervor, the U.S. seems to be playing the role of an off-shore balancer on this one. We’re not joined at the hip to one side. We may be tilting; but we’re not about to alienate the Russians forever. Would that we had such respect for the Arabs.
It is very interesting how Russian Premier Putin and his UN envoy Vitaly Churkin are using US ventures in to
Iraq to deflect criticism on Russian position in Georgia. They are drawing analogies for their peacekeeping responsibilites “to save civilians from agression” just as applied in Kosovo.
There is echo of applying justice as in Iraq. Putin asked if Saddam Hussain could be hanged for levelling
Shia villages why Georgian President Saakashvili
is inted protected despite his actions that caused 2000 casualties in Southern Ossetia.
If as Gardiner avers both the US and the Georgians were surprised by Russia’s reaction to the incursion of Saakashvili’s troops into S.Osettia then the US and its BBR-like client share the same amnesia re-recent history.
The Georgian army were ejected from the territory by Yeltsin’s military intervention in 1994.Granted the Russians did not press their advantage at that stage and advance further into Georgia but then they had not had to watch for over the decade while the US with Israeli assistance built up the Georgian military infrastructure.
Likewise the Russians remained pretty passive while George Soros and his Open Society networks fomented the series of phoney democracy insurgencies or “orange” and “rose” revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.
In the latter of course they helped facilitate the ouster of Shevardnaze and the installation of Sakashvili with the consequences we see today.
You are right, the analogies are interesting. Today they even borrowed one of the neocons favorite one: Munich ’38.
Naturally the lessons in democracy Saakashvili took from his OSI sponsors did not deter him from exercising authoritarian control over parliament,closing down opposition media,or arbitrarily prosecuting business leaders and political rivals as soon as he came to power in an election in which he had,we were told,received a barely credible 96% of the vote!
There was also the suspicious death of the one remaining political counterweight to his power,his popular prime minister in 2005.
OSI lessons in democracy must have encouraged Saakasvili to favour the more partial forms of democracy congenial to his rent-a-crowd elite sponsors like Soros.Moreover Saakasvili’s priority commitment was immediately to position Georgia as a NATO proxy-in-waiting fully armed and sponsored by the Western bloc prior to seeking to bring about any substantial economic development for Georgian citizens.
Putting it bluntly Washington’s protegy was all guns and no butter!
Now Saakashvilli will pay for that choice of priorities.
As Dimitri Simes argued convincingly in a Foreign Affairs piece,at the end of 2007 before these events transpired,the Russian operation to squash Georgian aspirations to forcibly integrate S.Ossetia and Abkhazia would be resounding and long-awaited pay-back not just for Western sponsorship of an independent Kosovo irrespective of Serbian/Russian objections,but for years of disdainful treatment of Russia at the hands of the US.
Kosovo set a precedent all too clear to the Russians but evidently lost on US “diplomats” and negotiators like Holbrooke.Most unrecognised former Soviet territories are keen like Ossetia and Abkhazia for independence leading to full integration with Russia not NATO and the western bloc as was the case in the Balkans.
All the bluster and hypocrisy of the US and its allies especially the UK is evident in the predictable denunciations of Russia’s political use of energy as a stick with which to beat troublesome pro-western proxies on its southern borders like Georgia and Ukraine.
Lest we forget with regard to Iraq and now Iran one would be hard pushed to find two powers more ready to use economic sanctions against perceived enemies
than these two aggressive imperialist ones.
Again,whereas the US like the British Empire before them,have been keen to use target ethnically and religiously mixed regions where it is easy to foment nationalist and separatist sensitivities as a means to forward their agenda of effecting Russia’s encirclement,Russia has refrained from antagonizing the US by inciting such passions among the Russian minority in Ukraine.
Global perceptions of US power have been damaged by the perception that Rice et al gave Saakashvili the green light and the expectation of US intervention on his behalf against Russia.
Worse the still the sight of Washington’s client cowering beneath security guards as Russian planes flew over his territory will not have been at all reassuring for any of Washington’s current or potential allies.
I think the Georgian President has learned the hard way that if you give all the concessions you can muster (sending troops to Iraq;wanting to join NATO; allowing bases on your soil) all that you will get in return in your moment of crisis is abject humuliation and a debt that no honest nation can pay.
He should have phoned Musharraf before taking his 15 minutes (quite literally) of fame in the US Green (lime)light.