For conservative pundits, it’s like a dream come true, a rerun of the good old bad days of the cold war, with a resurgent Russia rising and presenting itself as an easy bogeyman on the world stage.
As Russian tanks rolled into the break-away Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, we have been entreated to a chorus of belligerence from the right. An unnamed administration official — aren’t they always unnamed? — offered this to The Washington Post:
Explicitly evoking the Cold War era, a senior administration official said Russia’s “disproportionate” aggression “recalls variously the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and even the Soviet invasion of Georgia in 1922.”
“This kind of brutal attack has happened before against Georgia and against other countries that the Russians want to dominate,” the official said in a conference call organized following Bush’s brief remarks. The implication, he said, is that “Russia has the right to intervene anywhere in the former Soviet Union.”
Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post, compared the crisis to the one in 1938 that precipitated the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia (why do neocons always trot out the Nazi comparison?) and called it part of a grand strategy to “stop and, if possible, reverse the pro-Western trend on (its) borders” and “carve out a zone of influence within NATO, with a lesser security status for countries along Russia’s strategic flanks.”
Georgia’s unhappy fate is that it borders a new geopolitical fault line that runs along the western and southwestern frontiers of Russia. From the Baltics in the north through Central Europe and the Balkans to the Caucasus and Central Asia, a geopolitical power struggle has emerged between a resurgent and revanchist Russia on one side and the European Union and the United States on the other.
This is cold war logic without the international communist threat.
I am not excusing the Russians here. It seems pretty obvious that Putin and Co. were looking for an excuse to send in the troops, but the Georgians are not exactly innocent victims — or, at least, not the Georgian political class. The violence — which hits civilians hardest — is not acceptible on either side and must end.
This is the point that Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, made on the magazine’s Web site yesterday:
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was reckless to send in the military to subdue the Russian-leaning province of South Ossetia on Friday.
And Russia, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, responded with unnecessary force.
As in most modern conflicts, it is civilians who bear the brunt. There have been reports of more than 2,000 civilians killed already. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged Russia and Georgia not to fire on civilians, and to give them safe passage. Amnesty International warns that some of the attacks may already have constituted war crimes.
Russia does not have a legitimate claim here. It brutally subdued Chechnya, which was trying to secede from Russia. Georgia was trying to subdue a restive South Ossetia. What’s the difference?
Basically, there is plenty of blame to go around — with the Bush administration sharing a chunk of it. Fred Kaplan, on Slate, reminds us that the administration’s promise of NATO membership and American backing very likely emboldened the Georgians.
Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?
It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into
NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.
Wouldn’t the American public agree to something like that? Doubtful, especially with our troops mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, our ties to the Georgians preclude us from acting as impartial peace brokers.
That’s why the French have been so involved.
But, to get back to my original point about the neocons, what has been lacking in their various analyses has been an attention to context. The conflict is a complicated one that is tied to a host of issues, including the history of Russian domination of Georgia, the economics of oil and Russia’s desiare to rebuild its sphere of influence — and it has been brewing for nearly two decades.
As the Georgian journalist Margarita Akhvlediani writes in The Nation, the “conflict is rooted in the breakup of the Soviet Union.”
After Georgia gained independence in 1991, it immediately endured a breakup itself. In the early 1990s two regions–Abkhazia and South Ossetia–declared their independence. Civil war followed, and the Georgian government claimed Russia was helping fuel the conflict in the breakaway republics. In any case, the wars ended with no ultimate win: Georgian forces were unable to reclaim the rebel regions, and no country in the world would recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. For the next fifteen years, Russian peacekeeping forces have controlled a cease-fire agreement in both conflict zones. And while negotiations between the two sides continued, they were all but dead.
Last week, that frozen conflict became a hot zone, which then exploded into actual war. Soon after the Georgian artillery attack, Russian tanks entered Tskhinvali and Russian aircraft bombed Georgian military installations. The Russian Army was called in to help peacekeepers stabilize the situation. And the bombing of different parts of Georgia continues.
And, as she writes, it is the Georgian people who pay the price.
