In our recent conversations, it was clear to me that he was concluding that the West was not serious about resolving these conflicts, that he did not believe he would ever have the diplomatic support required, and that the status quo could not go on forever. He watched Russia's creeping annexation of Abkhazia start last spring with almost no Western response. That does not justify what clearly was a terrible strategic mistake by Georgia to act militarily. But it points to the mistakes--both of omission and commission--the West made that contributed to this crisis.
The article discusses what went wrong but what it never explains, imo, is why the West should have backed Georgia on South Ossetia in the first place. This is always the problem with these arguments. The assumption of strategic interests for the US and the West. Russia's interests are clearly discernible. The West's? To me, not discernible at all. The article does a great job of describing what went wrong IF YOU ASSUME that the West should have cared about South Ossetia:
First of all, it was the West that helped create and perpetuate the myth of Russia as peacekeeper in these conflicts. The origins of this mistake go back to the end of the first Bush administration--unwilling to get involved itself and convinced that a Russia under Boris Yeltsin and Andrei Kozyrev could be a benign force--which supported Russia taking the lead in policing these conflicts. That was Yeltsin. Then came Putin. What started out as a neutral role became a front for pursuing neo-imperial Russian objectives as Moscow increasingly took one side of the conflict. It became part of the problem, not the solution.
Assume all that is true, then those were the facts on the ground come 2008. You can not undo 16 years of mistakes in one week. And again, the WHY this should matter to the West remains unexplained. The article continues:
Over the years, many observers have urged the U.S. and its allies to amend these mandates--particularly to bring in non-Russian observers or peacekeepers in order to re-establish the neutrality of this force. The latest push for what was termed the "internationalization of the conflict" occurred earlier this summer as war clouds were appearing on the horizon in Abkhazia. But Western governments never seriously took up the issue. It was considered too difficult and too much to ask of Moscow, so diplomats demurred.
The calculation was South Ossetia was not worth it. Georgia did not like that calculation and decided to provoke this crisis. It got its ass kicked. And now expects the West to save his bacon. It seems to me that the problem here was not that the US and the West did not care much about South Ossetia the last 16 years, it is that is has decided to care now, backing a lunatic President of Georgia. The folly it seems to me is what we are doing now, not what we did then.
The article argues:
It would have been much preferable to fight that diplomatic fight then than have the situation we have now. Had we pushed for real neutral peacekeeping forces, we might have prevented this war.
I doubt that seriously. The Georgian President wanted South Ossetia and he would have provoked a crisis no matter what. As some point, he would have given Russia the excuse to kick his ass. This all depended on the US telling Georgia in the starkest terms that we did NOT have their back on South Ossetia. THAT was the mistake.
The article finally gets to the conflict itself - that South Ossetia does not want to be a part of Georgia:
Then there is Kosovo, where Western diplomacy increased Georgia's vulnerability and helped create the pretense for Putin's latest move. I supported Kosovo independence as did many others. But one need not be Clausewitz to understand that in doing so, we were putting a country like Georgia at risk for Russian retaliation. In spite of this, the West never had a plan to shield Georgia from the possible fall out from Kosovo. And today, the West is caught flat-footed as we watch Russia use many of our own arguments for Western intervention on Kosovo to justify Moscow's invasion of Georgia.
(Emphasis supplied.) Again, the assumptions are that Russia's arguments on South Ossetia do not have merit (Ithink they do) and because we pressed the right argument in Kosovo somehow it becomes "not right" because it is Russia doing the pressing. We should not back Georgia on South Ossetia. Georgia is wrong on South Ossetia. We have not vital interests in defending Georgia on South Ossetia. This is all ass backwards.
Finally, the real complaint here is one General Clark ignores, EUROPE does not think South Ossetia matters much in the scheme of things, no matter how much the US and our Media want them to:
There is also a direct line between NATO's failure to send a unified signal on Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest summit in early March. After a spectacular row over whether to grant Georgia and Ukraine a Membership Action Plan (MAP), the alliance agreed to drop the MAP option but offered "intensive engagement" along with a vague promise of membership sometime in the future. At the time, diplomats tried to put a positive spin on this outcome, claimed it was creative ambiguity. Well, that ambiguity turned out to be more destructive than creative.
Actually, I agree here that the ambiguity was bad. But not for the reasons the writer posits - the reverse in fact. It encouraged the lunatic Georgian President to provoke Russia. Europe did not agree with the US on this. Period. Someone should have told Georgia that without unity in NATO, he should be cool. No one did.
Instead, the US encouraged the Georgian fantasy. As the article notes:
Thus far, the E.U. has never taken a strong stand on Georgia vis-a-vis Moscow or, for example, provided practical assistance in terms of meaningful observers or peacekeepers. Even today, some E.U. leaders profess the need to stay neutral in the conflict while Georgia is being destroyed. Neither the U.S. nor Europe have ever drawn a thick red line and made it crystal clear to Moscow in advance that an invasion of Georgia would be unacceptable and would have grave consequences.
Actually, the failure to draw the clear line was the one that should have been made clear to Georgia, not Moscow. The article has the failure exactly backward imo.
By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only
