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Georgia was tricked, but by Russia or US?
By Ian Bell
23/08/08 "Sunday
Herald" -- LET'S
RUN through this again. Vladimir Putin is not a nice man. The
KGB, with whom the young Vlad earned his reputation as a people
person, was not Russia's answer to the Rotary Club. As a direct
consequence, Russian traditions of democracy remain wafer thin,
a cracked veneer that fails utterly to conceal thuggery, rigged
votes, oligarchic mafias, corruption, and the corpses of
journalists. Are we clear?
Russia's current identity is composed, meanwhile, of a volatile
mixture of intense nationalism and paranoia. Its rulers,
whatever their labels, take it as read that their country exists
under permanent threat of encirclement by its enemies. Now,
here's the tricky part: there is nothing currently to suggest
that they are mistaken. Intense nationalists of a different
stripe, feed the paranoia of the intense nationalists in Moscow.
This is not, of course, the story we have been hearing. When the
United States − having shredded the anti-ballistic missile
treaty that gave nuclear deterrence its single justification −
bribes Poland into housing rockets pointed at the Russians, we
hear only of a "shield". When Georgia launches smaller rockets
at a South Ossetian town, in defiance of all the humanitarian
rules, we hear only that a freedom-loving but "provoked"
Georgian leader has stepped into a cunning Russian trap.
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It may be, of course, that Georgia's President Saakashvili
committed just such an act of astonishing, inexplicable folly.
North Ossetia, ethnic and cultural twin to its disputed
neighbour in the south, is part of the Russian Federation. Putin
and those who support him - a clear majority, as no-one
disputes, of Russians and Ossetians - meanwhile have difficulty
understanding the concept of Georgian independence.
But when Saakashvili offered the gift of a direct military
challenge by shelling Ossetian Tskhinvali, hospitals, parliament
and all, how was Russia supposed to react? By asking politely
for clarification of Georgian intentions? Imagine the French
have just shelled the Channel Islands. What's our next move?
A daft analogy? Not as daft, I suspect, as the claim that the
US, with military advisers on site in Georgia busily equipping
and training its army, tried and failed to dissuade Saakashvili
from launching a war. Does America have so little influence over
a tiny client state that depends entirely on American goodwill?
Or did Saakashvili somehow get the wrong idea from someone
somewhere about the nature and scale of likely US support and US
responses? Nothing else makes any sense.
Much of the West's media have accepted the script as written,
and accepted it with enthusiasm. Some people, it seems, really
miss the Cold War. As political eminences in the US tell it,
that conflict never ended. Who knew? George Bush senior and the
"new world order" never happened. Without missing a beat, we are
back to "containing Russia". The proportionate response to a
five-day war in a postage-stamp region of the Caucasus is the
placing of missiles in Poland. Perhaps the Cubans should offer a
view?
Let's say, for argument's sake, that Saakashvili did indeed make
a grievous error. Let's accept that a Harvard education cannot
eradicate a tendency to hot-headedness. It's still either/or.
Either Saakashvili was misled, or he is dumb. Either way, does
that qualify him to be in a position to whistle-up the nuclear
arsenals of Nato should he have another rush of blood to the
head?
David Miliband, our vastly-experienced Foreign Secretary, thinks
it does. The latest junior Churchill argues that, precisely
because Georgia took a kicking from the Russians, its membership
of Nato should be nodded through forthwith. This was precisely
the outcome sought by the US at a Nato meeting in Bucharest in
the spring, long before anyone had heard of South Ossetia.
You can see how that one would run in State Department strategic
gaming. So the Russians get a little war, they would say, and
the chance to flaunt their cojones. If this plays, we get to
overcome the objections of the Germans, the French and the
Italians and plant another Nato flag in Russia's back yard. This
is known, I think, at least to the never-recently-sane, as a
price worth paying.
Does a leader with Saakashvili's lamentable credentials in war,
and as a democrat, really become entitled to have another crack
at the Russians with full Nato backing? Such is the meaning of
article V of the organisation's treaty: one for all and all for
one. If a Nato member is attacked, its brethren must come to its
aid militarily. We should grant that licence to the Rocket Man
of Tbilisi? Miliband says we should.
Putin and his stooge, Russian "President" Dmitry Medvedev, are
reliable villains. Russia says that Poland, with its planned
shield, must go back on the nuclear target list: the Apocalypse
Express gets its headline. Yet none of this, bizarre as it
sounds, should be Europe's real concern.
We are being sucked in, suckered and conscripted. As an
economically embattled US flails after former glories, it
fashions Nato into a blunt instrument. Whatever the
organisation's purpose during the Cold War, it currently stands
revealed as an expeditionary force on behalf of Washington's
interests. That is not a useful development for Nato, Europe,
America or the world.
Georgia should be proof enough. We know that Putin's Russia is
not to be trusted. But we also know a simple fact: in South
Ossetia, Saakashvili started the shooting. Had the United
Nations been allowed to function we might have been talking
about faults on both sides. Instead, we are offered a new Cold
War as though no other alternative is possible.
Far off in Afghanistan, meanwhile, 10 young Frenchmen die in a
single engagement; then three Poles. They join the list of
Britons, Canadians, Dutch and Americans that creeps towards 200
lives lost in 2008 alone, mostly for the sake of a Nato mission
in a war on terrorism declared, forgotten, botched, forgotten
and botched again under Washington's direction. So remind me:
where is Kabul, exactly, in relation to the North Atlantic?
The city is rather closer to Pakistan, source of the Taliban's
endlessly-replenished supplies of men and guns, a country that
has just discarded America's latest favourite general. Pervez
Musharraf leaves behind a state with ungovernable borders that
is also − let's take another bow − armed with real, rather than
Iranian potentially-perhaps nuclear weapons. Those in the
Taliban and al Qaeda, people who would do us actual harm in our
own towns and cities, given the chance, cannot feel too
disgruntled.
Another Cold War in Europe and a hot war on the old Northwest
Frontier: as a scorecard for Nato, these involve precious few
bonus points. You would have to mark them as abject failures.
Afghanistan begins to seem very like Europe's long-avoided
Vietnam. The disastrous challenge and counter-challenge with
Russia meanwhile has a very creaky and disreputable sort of plot
line. Nato, amid it all, has become America's proxy.
It was always that, in most senses. You suspect, however, that
an expiring Bush administration has found its gimmick, finally.
How to draw the sceptical and under-achieving Europeans back in
to the great global cause without deferring to their doubts and
finer feelings?
Forget threats, insults, or expressions of undying friendship:
binding treaties will do. Treaties, that is, and a couple of
decent scripts. Wag the dog. Do it all with a crisis in a place
with a name that might just have been invented. Do it with an
unending war on the authors of permanent, inchoate, indefinable
alien threat.
Putin, Saakashvili, and some Afghan warlords will be happy to
oblige. David Miliband will not even hesitate. And the matinee
crowds will be none the wiser.
Copyright Sunday Herald
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