If you sensed last August that something didn’t quite smell right with the Russia-Georgia spat and John McCain’s deep and passionate involvement in it from the start, you might want to read the always interesting Thomas P. Barnett. McCain played a role in egging on Saakashvili and precipitating a war that Georgia was always going to lose.
America’s enemies know how to play McCain. And the result will be war next time as it was last time. Only next time, it could be a nuclear Iran.
He accuses the Bush administration of enabling Georgia so as to benefit the McCain campaign. They already hate each other. But America needs Russia right now.
Yglesias tackles Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham:
Given that we have no way of forcibly dislodging Russia from Georgia, a person genuinely concerned with Georgia’s interests might see a bargaining opportunity. Here we have a missile defense program that terrifies the Russians, yet does us no good against the rogue states that are nominally its target. A deal could be struck here. A deal that would not only help secure our objectives in Georgia but would also allow the US-Russian bilateral relationship to refocus on vital issues of terrorism and nuclear proliferation rather than ethnic disputes in a remote mountain region.
Of course, last night’s Biden rhetoric was no subtler.
A reader writes:
Equating Georgia and South Ossetia/Abkhazia as ‘factions’ is totally silly. Georgia exists as a polity for a millennium (incorporating Abkhazia and the area known now as South Ossetia), it has a literate culture going way back (their alphabet was invented in the 5th century AD, their national epic, Rustaveli’s The Knight and the Panther skin was written in the 13th century). This is a culture that has produced great theatre directors (Robert Sturua has directed acclaimed productions in London and at the Edinburgh festival), films shown at Cannes, women’s world chess champions, world renowned choirs etc. This cultural richness has involved the various ethnic and linguistic groups resident in Georgia (Kartvelians, Mgrelians, Laz, Svan, Jews, Armenians etc.).
Neither Abkhazia nor South Ossetia (or Ossetia) have any past as (independent) polities.
They emerged due to Russian attempts at divide and rule, fueled in part admittedly by the fact, as Totten’s source indicates, that some ethnic minorities in Georgia have not always been given their due. But this is not a situation qualitatively different from the centralism characterizing e.g. Spain or France.
In time, as Georgia would try to fulfill the conditions of EU accession one would hope to see appropriate autonomy granted to certain provinces. The impatience you seem to display when discussing Georgia seems to stem from the fact that Saakashvili (unwisely) got very deep into bed with a variety of neocons, not realizing that involvement with as incompetent an administration as Bush’s could lead to disaster.
If Totten’s report is correct, Saakashvili didn’t manage to avoid a trap set for him by the Russians, a clever tactician he aint. But that’s quite different from being a crazy adventurer, as he was originally portrayed (and as the Russians seek to portray him.). It is certainly in the interest of the West to support Georgia, not only as an embattled people with a long standing and rich culture and not least due to its strategic importance (oil, proximity to Iran etc) but also because this is a case of a domino effect: if the Russians get away with this, they will move on to Ukraine, Moldova etc
My point was not to diminish the cultural richness and national identity of Georgia. It was to worry that the US does not have a dog in the fight over regional autonomy within Georgia or within Russia. And the question of how we can deter further Russian pressure on Ukraine, Moldova or Azerbaijan while securing critical Russian cooperation in the war on Jihadist terror is not reducible to Cold War blather.
But again: this is not to excuse Putin or Medvedev. It’s to insist that the West needs to respond to this intelligently, rather than moving instantly to isolating and marginalizing Russia.
Totten reports from Georgia:
Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong.
Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
It’s a box inside a box inside a box of ethnic resentment and ancient territorial struggle. So we should grant one faction in it membership in NATO?
Who is McCain kidding?
"After the Georgian leadership lost their marbles, as they say, all the problems got worse and a military conflict erupted. This is a serious warning, a warning to all. And I believe we should handle other existing conflicts in this context," – Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev to Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin.
Moscow’s success in Georgia is already leading to extreme pressure on Moldova and Azerbaijan. We are in denial if we do not see that Russia is back in a big way, and its first order of business is consolidating its near abroad. I should add, I suppose, that I do not believe the role of the West is to treat this like the Soviet Union. Putting the prestige and power of the West behind ethnic enclaves and countries bordering Russia is an absurd misplacement of priorities, especially when the West desperately needs Russian cooperation in securing nuclear materials, and an absence of outright Russian hostility on, or even alliance with, Iran. This is something we have to live with.
No, I didn’t make that up. And here’s that weird Christianity meme about Georgia again:
"Georgia was one of the first Christian nations," McCain said. "Georgia, back in the Third Century, the king of Georgia converted to Christianity. You see churches there that date back to the Fourth and Fifth Century."
Does McCain really think it’s wise foreign policy, in a time of Muslim Jihadism, to insert sectarian dimensions into questions such as Russia’s near-abroad? Is he really up for a crusade?
Frank Rich asks all the right ones:
Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?
A bridge to the more polarizing global politics of the 20th Century? Or a man with more caution, steadiness and pragmatism? That’s the choice.
Pat Buchanan points out a salient fact:
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia. Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
That a key McCain adviser nearly got NATO committed to a war with Russia over South Ossetia should send up alarms about a McCain presidency. Is there any war McCain would not be prepared to launch if he felt his honor were impugned or a bully was getting his way? Just because Putin is paranoid doesn’t mean McCain isn’t out to get him.
The Dish 