The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee argues the West can't abandon Georgia to Russia.
It has been clear for months, even years, that Russia was determined to teach Georgia a lesson. Moscow was unhappy when the birthplace of Stalin broke away after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and furious when the enthusiastically pro-American Mr. Saakashvili came to power vowing to join the Western military alliance, NATO.
To undermine him, Moscow slapped sanctions on Georgia and upgraded ties with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As tensions rose, it sent tanks to the Georgian border, staged a sabre-rattling military exercise on the border with South Ossetia and started cyber-attacks against Georgia's Internet system. It was a classic squeeze play, straight out of the old Soviet manual.
Far from urging Mr. Saakashvili to lash back, Washington urgently and repeatedly urged him to show restraint. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice privately told him he should not get into a fight with Russia that tiny Georgia could never win. Only when Russian troops were rolling through the Roki tunnel linking Russia to South Ossetia, says Mr. Saakashvili, did he unleash his own forces.
That was a disastrous mistake, supplying the Russians with the pretext they needed to launch an all-out assault. But the idea that Georgian aggression forced Russia to intervene is as absurd as the Nazi claim that Polish aggression started the Second World War. Indeed, without drawing exaggerated parallels, the Russian claim to be defending minorities in Georgia has unsettling echoes of the Nazi claim to be protecting ethnic Germans when it invaded Czechoslovakia. The claim looks especially thin coming from a country that only recently laid waste to a minority nationality, the Chechens, who dared to seek independence from Russia. Death to Free Chechnya! Hail Free South Ossetia!
Now that he's established Russian hypocrisy and aggression, what to do?
True, Washington can't back Georgia with military might, any more than it could back Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. But there are other ways to respond to Russia's aggression: downgrading political and military ties, revoking its status as a G8 country, barring it from the World Trade Organization. Georgia has been a setback, but it's wrong to think the West has no options for response. It has several, and it should use them.
On Thursday, author Misha Glenny wrote the following:
Clearly, Russia has been goading the Georgian government for several years into making the big mistake. The parastates of Abkhazia and, above all, South Ossetia, have been under the control of a toxic coalition of criminals and both former and serving Russian security service officers. Russian soldiers have been acting as their protectors under the guise of a peacekeeping mission, preventing Georgia's attempts to seek a negotiated reintegration of the two areas. The Georgian crisis has clearly benefited the standing of hard-liners in Moscow still aggrieved at Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's decision to have the moderate, business-friendly Dimitry Medvedev succeed him in the Kremlin.
But under the influence of an energetic neo-con lobby in Washington and with considerable support from Israeli weapons manufacturers and military trainers, Mr. Saakashvili and the hawks around him came to believe the farcical proposition that Georgia's armed forces could take on the military might of their northern neighbour in a conventional fight and win.
So the Russians set a trap, and prodded by U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney's people, Georgia walked right into it. ...
Meanwhile, the foreign implications of the error are graver still. Russia is placing a marker on Ukraine. Do not, Moscow says, even think of allowing Ukraine into NATO, otherwise what we have seen in Georgia will be child's play. So the West will have to think hard how to play Ukraine's application to join the military alliance.
This, in turn, has accentuated the divisions within the EU between those countries, including Germany, which remain cautious about a course of open confrontation with Russia, and Britain which has echoed calls from Washington demanding that Russia's application to join the WTO be reconsidered.
Glenny thought the dynamics of the U.S. presidential campaign could be changed by developments in Georgia, which in itself creates difficulties.
This political dynamic is driving the West toward a rift with Russia that will polarize a number of other issues, including policy toward Iran. On this latter issue, Russia has played a relatively constructive and, perhaps more importantly, a moderating role. In the next three months, the issues of Ukraine and Iran will loom large in global politics and they may well have a decisive impact on the outcome of the U.S. election. Who set the trap in Georgia? Mr. Putin and his thuggish security service pals or Mr. Cheney and his equally unflappable neo-con friends?
Whether Georgia was defeated by the Russians or lost by the neo-cons, a touch of diplomatic sobriety on both sides would be a welcome development if the Georgian conflict is not to mark a very dangerous new phase in the development of global politics - serial confrontation between the West and Russia.