Billmon and others on Georgia

The acclaimed Billmon has come out of retirement with an excellent post on why the Georgia-Russia situation wasn't discussed more thoroughly in our Congress and our media in the last few years along with an outstanding history lesson. He's tough to excerpt so I'd recommend going and reading the whole thing first and then returning here.

If you read nothing else here or anywhere else, read the Billmon post.

Jerome a Paris pointed out an article by Anatol Lieven who is a professor in the war studies department of King's College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. He covered the Georgian civil wars of the 1990s as a correspondent for the Times (London). He's written an op-ed in the Financial Times that sums the Georgia-Russia debacle quite clearly.

The bloody conflict over South Ossetia will have been good for something at least if it teaches two lessons. The first is that Georgia will never now get South Ossetia and Abkhazia back. The second is for the west: it is not to make promises that it neither can, nor will, fulfil when push comes to shove.

Georgia will not get its separatist provinces back unless Russia collapses as a state, which is unlikely. The populations and leaderships of these regions have repeatedly demonstrated their desire to separate from Georgia; and Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister, made it clear again and again that Russia would fight to defend these regions if Georgian forces attacked them. [...]

The latest conflict is humiliating for the US, but it may have saved us from a far more catastrophic future: namely an offer of Nato membership to Georgia and Ukraine provoking conflicts with Russia in which the west would be legally committed to come to these countries' aid - and would yet again fail to do so. There must be no question of this being allowed to happen - above all because the expansion of Nato would make such conflicts much more likely.

Instead, the west should demonstrate to Moscow its real will and ability to defend those east European countries that have already been admitted into Nato, and to which it is therefore legally and morally committed - especially the Baltic states. We should say this and mean it. Under no circumstances should we extend such guarantees to more countries that we do not intend to defend. To do so would be irresponsible, unethical and above all contemptible.

To which Smintheus added this comment in a discussion on billmon's excellent post,

It demonstrated that the US won't allow itself to be dragged by 2nd rate powers into their disputes with Russia. Had the US succeeded in gaining NATO membership for Georgia or given military assistance to Georgia in this war, it would have opened the floodgates. Every dispute between Russia and one of its neighbors would have been turned into a make-or-break test of America's determination to contain Russia. Saakashvili was convinced in advance of this war that he could manipulate the US into the conflict. From an interview the day before he ordered troops into South Ossetia:

[Saakashvili] says he cannot imagine the West not coming to Georgia's aid. It would be like the betrayal of Hungary in 1956 or the then Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Soviet Union's aggressive repression of restive satellites was met with silence from the West.

If those buttons had worked when he started punching them, then every other regime in Russia's vicinity would have started trying them out as well.

All of which prompts me to ask why we weren't examining the moves towards the ex-Soviet Union countries more carefully in the blogosphere. Yes, there were other things going on, the Iraq War, warrantless surveillance, corruption ala Abramoff et al, dirty tricks in the DOJ, the failure of the Katrina response, but foreign policy that commits us to fight on multiple fronts must always be of importance. Any discussion of NATO membership or other similar mutual aid pacts must be examined much more closely in Congress, in the media and yes, in the blogosphere.