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Why The West Has Got It So Wrong Over Georgia
By IAIN MacWHIRTER
18/08/08 "The
Herald" -- -
One minute you're looking for South Ossetia on a map; the next
everyone's talking about nuclear confrontation. The escalation
of the conflict in the Caucasus into a kind of post-modern Cold
War has been breathtaking. But great international conflicts
have a habit of starting in "far-away places of which we know
nothing": Sarajevo, Poland, Pearl Harbour and now South Ossetia.
Fortunately, our diplomatic mechanisms are rather better at
handling international crises than they were in 1914. But that
doesn't mean we are out of the woods yet in the Caucasus. It's a
sobering thought that, if George W Bush had had his way and
Georgia had been a member of Nato, we would now be at war with
Russia.
Nato is an alliance which, in theory at least, commits its
signatories to react collectively to a military threat to any
one of its members. Would we really have been prepared to lay
waste to Europe in support of the unstable and unreliable
Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, who launched a cowardly,
brutal assault on the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali under
the cover of the opening night of the Olympic Games? I hope not,
but we can't be sure. With someone like George W Bush supposedly
leading the "free world", we can't be sure of anything, except
that it will be a mess.
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The war in South Ossetia has been a huge error of judgment by
the west, and further confirmation of the imponderable stupidity
of the Bush administration. It was a gamble that should never
have been made, on a conflict nobody wanted, in the interests of
a political leader who has no right to our respect. David
Cameron will regret his hot-headed dash to Tblisi to be
photographed with Saakashvili once it becomes widely known what
actually happened in South Ossetia, where the Georgians used
Grad missiles against apartment blocks and hospitals.
Now, I know we are supposed to see South Ossetia as a brutal
land grab by the Russian Bear, crushing gallant little Georgia
under the Moscow boot, etc. The western media has largely
accepted the line put out by Washington that we have seen an
attempted annexation of a sovereign nation by an imperialist
superpower, in the manner of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in
1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. But, as always in war, truth is
the first casualty.
The Caucasian war was actually launched by Georgia on August 7
in an attempt to crush the separatist movement of South Ossetia.
While there was provocation on both sides, this was an act of
bloody madness. It was like England launching a war against
Scotland for wanting to leave the UK. I'm not saying Russia did
not have an interest in supporting a breakaway - it had been
handing out Russian passports to Ossetians - or that Putin
wasn't playing politics in the region. But that did not justify
an all-out military attack by Georgia. The west - by which,
essentially, we mean America - massively miscalculated in
Georgia, supplying military hardware and expertise to
Saakashvili without ensuring he would behave responsibly. The
Georgian leader thought he could force the Americans to
intervene militarily in support of his attempt to crush Ossetian
nationalism. It did not, of course. Not even Mr Bush is stupid
enough to launch a land war in the Caucasus. There is no
evidence that the Russians plan to annex South Ossetia, still
less to invade Georgia with a view to forcing it into the
Russian federation. The Russian military have been in no hurry
to withdraw, but the evidence is clear that they are now
preparing to do so. They don't have the will or the means to
occupy a country such as Georgia anyway.
Not only has Russia now restored its military self-confidence
and credibility; it has exposed the west's weakness and
confusion, already evident in Iraq. But what is much worse is
that America has handed the moral high ground to someone who
certainly doesn't deserve it: the Russian Prime Minister,
Vladimir Putin. This authoritarian hardman, who has suppressed
free speech in Russia and manipulated its democratic system to
ensure his continued rule, can now stand as a champion of the
rights of the oppressed people of Ossetia; as protector of the
weak against military aggression.
Putin has played his hand very astutely, limiting his military
action to destroying Georgian forces' positions around South
Ossetia, agreeing to a ceasefire and abiding by it, and now
gradually pulling the Russian military out of greater Georgia.
Of course there will be reprisals, communal violence and stories
of atrocities both by South Ossetians and Georgians. But
eventually the west will have to recognise, when we see the
pictures of the devastation in Tskhinvali (you can see them
already on the internet), that Russia had - as the former Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said - very little alternative but
to intervene in South Ossetia.
Putin can, with some legitimacy, compare his "humanitarian"
intervention in Georgia with that of the west in Kosovo. And the
truth is that his call for South Ossetians to be allowed
self-determination like the former Yugoslavian province is the
only defensible one in the Caucasian context. The only solution
to the confrontation is for the people of South Ossetia to be
consulted and allowed to choose their own destiny, under the
inalienable right of all peoples to self-determination. What
must not happen is for the west, led by fools in the White
House, to compound this misjudgment by seeking to crush the
independence movement in South Ossetia.
Yet, by promising to defend the territorial integrity of
Georgia, we are coming dangerously close to doing precisely
that. We have no right to tell the South Ossetians which country
they are to live in. After the bloody behaviour of Georgian
troops in Tskhinvali, it would be unthinkable to force the South
Ossetians to bend to the will of Tbilisi and remain part of
Georgia.
But perhaps the greatest mistake of all by the west was, as
President Bush might put it, "misunderestimating" Putin and the
Russians. Calling Russia "Saudi Arabia with trees" was more
revealing of the state of American diplomatic skill than of
Russia. Could you have imagined John F Kennedy indulging in
name-calling? Further, placing missiles in Poland and arming
Saakashvili were acts of provocation no country could have
ignored. Imagine if Russia had placed "defensive" missiles in
Mexico or sent arms to Cuba?
Well: it did, of course, back in 1962, when Russia was the
Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev was arming Castro. The
American response then, quite rightly, was to demand the
withdrawal of Soviet missiles from its sphere of influence. The
roles are reversed today, and we have Bush rather than
Khrushchev gambling with world security. But I don't find that a
great consolation. The world nearly went to nuclear war over
Cuba. Let's hope that we can stop history repeating itself.
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