More POVs on the Georgia-Russia conflict

-- Michael Dobbs deflates the rah-rah mentality in this Washington Post article:  'We Are All Georgians'? Not So Fast.

Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia have little in common with either Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. They are better understood against the backdrop of the complicated ethnic politics of the Caucasus, a part of the world where historical grudges run deep and oppressed can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.

Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in the shadow of the mountains that rise along Russia's southern border. I was there in March 1991, shortly after the city was occupied by Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia's first acts as Georgian president was to cancel the political autonomy that the Stalinist constitution had granted the republic's 90,000-strong Ossetian minority.

After negotiating safe passage with Soviet interior ministry troops who had stationed themselves between the Georgians and the Ossetians, I discovered that the town had been ransacked by Gamsakhurdia's militia. The Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian poet and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who had fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.

It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians viewed Georgians in much the same way that Georgians view Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking away their independence. "We are much more worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian imperialism," an Ossetian leader, Gerasim Khugaev, told me. "It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time."

When it comes to apportioning blame for the latest flare-up in the Caucasus, there's plenty to go around. The Russians were clearly itching for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic and provocative. The United States may have stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to believe that he enjoyed American protection, when the West's ability to impose its will in this part of the world is actually quite limited.

-- Jeffrey Taylor has an excellent background information article on Georgia and Russia in The Atlantic.

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.

There's lots more worth reading in Taylor's article. [via]

-- The BBC reports on what it calls the propaganda war between Georgia and Russia as follows: [via]

The Bush administration appears to be trying to turn a failed military operation by Georgia into a successful diplomatic operation against Russia. It is doing so by presenting the Russian actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian attack into South Ossetia on 7 August, which triggered the Russian operation. Yet the evidence from South Ossetia about that attack indicates that it was extensive and damaging.

The BBC's Sarah Rainsford has reported: "Many Ossetians I met both in Tskhinvali and in the main refugee camp in Russia are furious about what has happened to their city. They are very clear who they blame: Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili, who sent troops to re-take control of this breakaway region." [...]

-- Michael Walzer of Dissent magazine makes six points about the Georgian and Russian words and actions. I agree with point #3 which highlights the incompetencies of Bush foreign policy and point #6 about needing a better foreign policy discussion. [via]

-- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates makes it clear that there will be no US military intervention in Georgia. The McClatchy article also points out that Gates was at one time the CIA's top Soviet analyst thus presumably bringing a little bit more to the table in terms of knowledge about the ongoing history of the region.

-- There's a second McClatchy article on the impact of Gates' no intervention statement along with more on the ground reporting of conditions, that's worth taking the time to read. They also cover in an earlier article, the Bush administration assertions that they tried to restrain Saakashvili along with noting that those messages may have been very mixed.