#Tayler: At Putin's mercy
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Russia has obscured both the United States' culpability in bringing
about the conflict, and the nature of the separatism that caused it in
the first place"
by Jeffrey Tayler
At Putin's Mercy
Georgia's forty-year-old president, the liberal Mikheil Saakashvili,
may possess many admirable attributes—dashing looks, fluency in
several languages (including English), a degree from Columbia Law
school, and a heartfelt commitment to a Westward-looking future for
his country—but strategic acumen, even plain old-fashioned common
sense, do not, it is now tragically apparent, figure among them.
Rather, Saakashvili is well-known in Georgia for his authoritarian
streak and hotheadedness—the most damning character flaws imaginable
in a confrontation with the calculating former spymaster and current
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin.
Saakashvili won presidential elections in 2004 promising to impose
Tbilisi's writ on the three Russia-backed rebellious republics of
Ajaria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. In short order, without firing a
shot, he reclaimed Ajaria and sent its leader, Aslan Abashidze,
fleeing to Moscow. But his reckless decision last week to shell and
then invade South Ossetia (populated mostly by ethnic Ossetes holding
Russian passports) and attack Russian forces stationed there, combined
with his now obviously misplaced faith in the senior Bush
administration officials, including President Bush himself, who have
been glad-handing him since he came to power following the Rose
Revolution of 2003, may yet undo his presidency and return Georgia to
Russian vassalage.
The pitiable David-and-Goliath asymmetry of Georgia's dustup with
Russia, plus Saakashvili's repeated hyperbolic declarations to
satellite news stations, have obscured both the United States'
culpability in bringing about the conflict, and the nature of the
separatism that caused it in the first place. (Among other assertions,
Saakashvili has called Russia's response to Georgia's assault on South
Ossetia "a direct challenge for the whole world," and has said,
"tomorrow Russian tanks might reach any European capital . . . [the
war] is not really about Georgia but in a certain sense it's also an
aggression against America".)
The United States started cozying up to Georgia before Saakashvili's
time, during the ultra-corrupt presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze. At
Georgia's request, in 2002 the U.S. began training, equipping, and
modernizing the Georgian military for counterterrorism operations. It
was a reasonable course of action in the wake of 9/11, and it
especially made sense in view of the Baku-Supsa pipeline and plans to
build the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline—the sole energy conduits to
bypass Russia, thereby lessening the Kremlin's potential stranglehold
over gas and oil exports from Central Asia to the West. But rigged
elections for the Georgian parliament in November of 2002 incited
widespread demonstrations. With backing and direction from American
NGOs, and possibly guidance from U.S. ambassador Richard Miles (the
former chief of mission in Belgrade who had helped the Yugoslav
opposition peacefully topple Milosevic), the Georgian opposition
carried out the Rose Revolution, unseating Shevardnadze and eventually
resulting in the instatement of the charismatic pro-American
Saakashvili.
Once in office, Saakashvili quickly sought to ally his country with
the West, voicing aspirations to join the European Union and NATO. The
Bush administration, flush with enthusiasm for promoting democracy
after "liberating" Iraq, and certainly aware of Georgia's role as
transit arena for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, was receptive.
President Bush visited Tbilisi in 2005 and declared Georgia "a beacon
of liberty," even as troublesome signs of Saakashvili's authoritarian
streak were coming to light. The Georgian opposition has levied
charges against Saakashvili of corruption and murder, and Western
human rights groups, and even the State Department, have criticized
him for the excessive use of force in suppressing demonstrations and
restricting freedoms of the press, assembly, and political
representation.
Soon Bush began promoting a third round of expansion for NATO and
supported Georgia's ambitions to join. (Two previous rounds, in 1999
and 2002, proceeded over strong Russian objections, and had
encompassed the Baltic states and erstwhile Soviet satellite countries
in Eastern Europe.) In April of 2007 President Bush signed into law
the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act, which advocates, and allocates
funding for, the accession to NATO of the former Soviet republics of
Georgia and Ukraine (as well as Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia). The
pledge of mutual defense enshrined in the North Atlantic Treaty
declares that, "an armed attack against one [member] . . . shall be
considered an attack against . . . all." It was a protection
Saakashvili hoped to avail himself of so as to free Georgia from the
sphere of influence Putin was reasserting for Russia in former Soviet
domains. Despite the fury to which the subject provoked Putin, the
Bush administration lavished praise on Saakashvili and set about
lobbying other NATO member states on his behalf, with mixed success.
The mere possibility that Georgia and Ukraine might join NATO prompted
Russia to start flexing its military muscles and prepare for
confrontation with Saakashvili and the West. In July of 2007 Russia
suspended its participation in the Treaty of Conventional Forces, a
landmark security accord of the post-Cold-War era. Apparently as a
warning to Tbilisi, in August of that year a Russian aircraft fired a
missile (which did not explode) onto Georgian territory. Clashes
between Georgia and separatist militias in South Ossetia and Abkhazia
increased; and although Saakashvili proposed autonomy to the two
republics, he refused to rule out the use of force against them,
scuppering the negotiations' chances of success. In September of 2007,
Russia successfully tested what may be the world's most powerful
conventional explosive device (dubbed Papa Vsekh Bomb, or the "Dad of
All Bombs," by the Moscow media), a thermobaric, "air-delivered
ordnance . . . comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and
capability," in the words of a deputy chief of Russia's General Staff.
Then, in a move reminiscent of the Cold War's grimmest days, Russian
TU-95 long-range bombers resumed round-the-clock patrols that had
ceased with the fall of the Soviet Union. These bombers have
repeatedly veered toward NATO airspace, inciting alliance members
Britain and Norway to scramble their fighter jets to intercept them.
The bombers always retreat, but this, and a Soviet-style military
parade—the first since the collapse of the USSR—held on Red Square
this year, signal one thing: Russia is back.
Neither the Bush administration nor Saakashvili got the message.
Germany, France, and Belgium, however, fearful of antagonizing Moscow
even more, and especially concerned about Georgia's festering
conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia (stability and recognized
borders are prerequisites for NATO membership) declined to endorse
President Bush's initiative to bring Georgia into NATO. At the
alliance summit in April of 2008, despite appeals from President Bush,
NATO refused to offer Georgia a Membership Action Plan (the first step
toward accession) and postponed the issue until the next summit in
December. Under the auspices of the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act,
the United States has nevertheless continued to finance the general
upgrading of the country's military. About one hundred American
military advisors were in Georgia when war broke out.
Emboldened by the prospect of membership in the world's most daunting
military bloc, Georgia has had scant reason to compromise over the
separatist regions. Were NATO to have admitted Georgia (the prospects
seem dimmer than ever now) Georgia could have turned such disputes
into casus belli between Moscow and the West. But that the United
States would even consider proposing Georgia for membership in NATO
reflects a blindness to the consequences of the first two rounds of
NATO expansion and defies elementary strategic logic. Leaving aside
how enrolling a tiny, technologically backward nation located in the
remote Caucasus region jibes with NATO's treaty-adjured mission to
"promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area," the
next round could kill what remains of Russia's strategic cooperation
with the West—cooperation the West will need, for example, to fight
Islamic extremism in Central Asia, contain nuclear threats from Iran
and North Korea, and control the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And
Russia, with vast reserves of oil and gas, its arsenal of ICBMs, its
million-strong conventional forces, its advanced arms industry, and
its close relations with states like Iran, Syria, and North Korea,
retains considerable capacity as a maker or breaker of international
equilibrium. The West needs Russia on its side, much more than it
could benefit from admitting Georgia to NATO, and even more than it
would profit from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa pipelines.
Moreover, NATO's previous encroachments into formerly Soviet terrain,
in conjunction with NATO's 1999 war to prise Kosovo from Yugoslavia
(an historic Russian ally and fellow Orthodox Christian nation)
ignited in Russia the very anti-Western passions that have propelled
nationalistic Vladimir Putin to sustained approval ratings of between
70 and 80 percent and threaten a new cold war. (When, in February of
2008, the United States recognized Kosovo's independence, Putin
objected angrily, warning that a precedent was being set that would
apply to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.)
Putin has strongly and repeatedly voiced objections to NATO's proposed
expansion. Most notably, in February of 2007 he delivered an address
in Munich that expressed a consensus—still valid—among the Russian
political elite and people as a whole. After obliquely inveighing
against the hegemonic pretensions of the United States, Putin called
the upcoming enlargement an attempt "to impose new dividing lines and
walls on us," and "a serious provocation that reduces the level of
mutual trust." He need not be paranoid to discern in U.S. foreign
policy evidence of hegemonic intent. The 2002 National Security
Strategy declared that, "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade
potential adversaries in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of
the United States," and abandoned deterrence—the dominant peacekeeping
principle of the Cold War. The Strategy issued in 2006 went further,
proclaiming that, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and
support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and
culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world"—an
implicit threat to Putin's autocratic regime, rendered all the more
cogent by the "color revolutions" that American NGOs supported in
Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The Bush administration's plans to
station elements of a missile-defense shield in Eastern Europe have
also poisoned relations with Moscow, especially since the shield could
conceivably be deployed to shoot down Russian ICBMs after a first
strike by the West. This is a strategically defensible apprehension in
view of America's continuous upgrading of its nuclear arsenal and its
drive to establish nuclear primacy, plus the ongoing decay of Russia's
atomic weapons.
Since Saakashvili came to power, U.S. policy toward Georgia has been
marked by ignorance of the Caucasus' history, and by aggressive
assertion of lofty ideals divorced from realities on the ground.
Whatever Saakashvili says about Georgia's relations with Russia now,
the two countries share a deep history that complicates the present.
Georgia, in fact, owes its very survival as a state to Russia. In
1783, the Georgian King Irakli II signed the Treaty of Georgiyevsk
with Russia that would allow Russia to annex his country two decades
later. The Georgians, wearied by Mongol, Ottoman, and Persian
invasions, had for two centuries been pleading for Russian protection;
to get it they were ready to surrender their sovereignty.
Georgia's problems with South Ossetia and Abkhazia stem from age-old
internecine hatreds, accusations of massacres, and the two separatist
regions' longstanding fears of what they regard as Georgian
imperialism. Ethnically distinct from Georgians, the Ossetians are an
ancient Iranian-Caucasian Christian people that the Mongol and Turkic
invasions of the Middle Ages drove high into the rockbound barrens of
Caucasus Mountains. Only Russian suzerainty over the region,
established in the nineteenth century, allowed them to return to the
fertile lowlands; whence the historical Ossetian amity toward Russia
and view of Russia as something of a savior. Ossetia's division into
North and South is artificial and stems from Joseph Stalin's tenure as
commissar of nationalities in the 1920s, during which the future
dictator drew the multiethnic Soviet Union's administrative boundaries
in accordance with a policy of "unite-and-conquer," joining peoples
with longstanding enmities into various "republics" and "autonomous
zones" that would inevitably quarrel among themselves and therefore
look to the Kremlin to keep the peace. Stalin (né Dzhugashvili),
himself of Ossete and Georgian parents, split Ossetia, placing the
southern half in Georgia (and giving it a measure of Soviet-style
pseudo autonomy) and the northern half in Russia.
The peace collapsed with the dissolution of Kremlin rule in the
region. In 1990, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, the South
Ossetians declared independence from Georgia. In response, the
Georgian leader at the time, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, abolished their
autonomy. The South Ossetians then revolted against Tbilisi and ethnic
Georgians fled South Ossetia en masse. Yeltsin brought about a
cease-fire in 1992, under which Russia, with Georgia's consent,
stationed troops in South Ossetia, ostensibly to keep the peace. Since
then clocks in Tskhinvali have run on Moscow time; the ruble has
served as the main currency; and Russia has granted citizenship to a
majority. Saakashvili often vowed to impose his writ on South Ossetia,
but the presence of Russian troops, to say nothing of the vehement
anti-Georgian sentiments of the population, led to an often incendiary
stand-off, with clashes occurring right up to the outbreak of the war.
To the west of South Ossetia lies the Republic of Abkhazia. Annexed by
Russia in 1810, but joined to Georgia by—again—Stalin, Abkhazia is
home to the virulently anti-Georgian, Abkhaz people, about one fifth
of whom are Muslims who look to their (Muslim) brethren across the
border in Russia for support. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Abkhaz
separatists, aided by Russia, expelled Georgian troops from the
republic, and a quarter-million ethnic Georgians fled with them. In
1994 Abkhazia declared independence (recognized by no one). Most
Abkhaz are now Russian citizens. At least until the current war, CIS
and UN peacekeepers patrolled the Abkhaz border with Georgia.
Saakashvili pledged to recover Abkhazia, but UN-sponsored negotiations
foundered, and no resolution has been in sight for a long time.
Formally, at least, all sides—Georgia, Russia, the United States, and
the European Union—recognized the sacrosanct nature of Georgia's
borders—the same borders Stalin had drawn precisely in order to
provoke the very conflicts that erupted in the Caucasus region with
the fall of the Soviet Union and that we see unfolding now. The sole
reasonable solution to the conflict—referenda in the two republics on
independence, accession to Russia, or return to Georgian rule—has, so
far, not figured in peace negotiations. Saakashvili opposed the idea
in the past, and the Bush administration continues to insist on
Georgia's territorial integrity—that is, on Stalin's borders. There is
little doubt that now neither the Ossetes nor the Abkhaz would choose
to rejoin Georgia.
Perhaps Saakashvili believed that, with the world's eyes on the
opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, he could launch a lightning
assault on South Ossetia and reclaim the republic without substantial
grief from Moscow, as he had Ajaria in 2004. His statements once the
war began demonstrated that he expected real Western help in
confronting Russia. Whatever prompted him to miscalculate, the
strategic realities ignored by the Bush administration in pumping up
Saakashvili's ambitions reasserted themselves as soon as Moscow
responded to Saakashvili's gambit with the largest military assault,
by land, sea, and air since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in
1979. Within days, Georgia lost both South Ossetia and Abkhazia to
Russia, two thousand Georgians were dead, tens of thousands had been
displaced, foreigners were being evacuated, and Gori and Tbilisi,
their airports bombed, appeared threatened.
As Russian bombs rained down on Georgia and Saakashvili pleaded for
help from the West and for a cease-fire from Moscow, Putin stated
bluntly that "Georgia's aspiration to join NATO . . . is driven by its
attempt to drag other nations and peoples into its bloody adventures,"
and warned that, "the territorial integrity of Georgia has suffered a
fatal blow." The Bush administration answered with boilerplate
language of protest, failing even to dispatch Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice to the region until six days later for rounds of
shuttle diplomacy. Saakashvili complained that "all we got so far are
just words, statements, moral support, humanitarian aid." But neither
the United States nor Europe will risk Armageddon for Georgia. For
Saakashvili, game over.
The United States has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned
Saakashvili, the poster-boy of the color revolutions, and left him at
the mercy of Putin, who appears bent on exacting revenge. Moscow and
the separatist leaders in both republics have pledged to charge
Saakashvili in the Hague for genocide. The lessons that emerge from
the Russia-Georgia war are clear: Russia is back, the West fears
Russia as much as it needs it, and those who act on other assumptions
are in for a rude, perhaps violent, awakening.
The historically volatile Georgians overthrew their two previous
democratically elected leaders for much less than humiliation at
Russia's hands and what will be the permanent loss of their two
coveted wayward regions. Bitter notes of resignation and reproach
toward the West are already creeping into Saakashvili's public
pronouncements. "I have staked my country's fate on the West's
rhetoric about democracy and liberty," he wrote in an op-ed piece for
the Washington Post. He will take little comfort in remembering that
the Bush administration, in adopting the outlandishly unrealistic
National Security Strategy of 2006, did the same.
--
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government
talking
about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.
Nothing has
changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
we're
talking about getting a court order before we do so"
-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004
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