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Georgia: the super cop vanishes
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Agencies on August 20, 2008 01:06:00
 
Sreeram Chaulia
As Russia carries its overwhelming response to Georgia’s invasion of South
Ossetia into Georgian territory, the United States is appealing for restoration
of Georgia’s territorial integrity. This is the same U.S. which, a few months
ago, was overeager to bless Kosovo as an independent state at the cost of
Serbia’s territorial integrity. Just as Washington paid little heed to
Moscow’s protests at that time over the illegality of Kosovo’s stateh ood,
Moscow is now rebutting in the same vein that there is no question of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia being returned to Georgian suzerainty.  Behind the
Russian-Georgian recriminations over who owns which patch of land in the
Caucasus and which side committed war crimes lie larger trends that mirror the
changing world order.
Firstly, Russia has proved that it has the military aces up its sleeve to
assert superiority over its sphere of influence or ‘near abroad.’ In recent
years, Moscow has employed its vast gas reserves as a strategic weapon in
tussles with NATO allies like Ukraine. However, the war with Georgia is
Russia’s first military expedition outside its borders since the fall of the
Soviet Union. What is more, it went unchallenged. Russian forces routed Georgian
forces from South Ossetia and Abkhazia and then penetrated Georgia proper with
little resistance. Georgians were left cursing ‘friends’ in Washington who
failed to come to the rescue when the old colonial Russian military machine was
scything through their terrain. Washington has provided the argumentative basis
for Russia to absorb South Ossetia and Abkhazia and linger on in parts of
Georgia.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has sounded a warning to Russian
leaders that 2008 is not 1968, when unopposed Soviet tanks rolled over
Czechoslovakia to crush rebellion and force regime change. It is a signal that
Washington would not sit quiet and accept a fait accompli if Russia occupies
Georgia or dethrones the West’s protégé, Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili. But in concrete terms, the architect of the military campaign,
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, knows well that the U.S. cannot do much
beyond verbal protestation about the merger of South Ossetia and Abkhazia with
Russia.
The world has come a long way since the first Gulf War, when the George H.W.
Bush administration cobbled a military coalition to restore Kuwait’s
sovereignty after it was destroyed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. At the onset of
unipolarity in 1991, Washington sounded out a new hegemonic bugle that it will
not tolerate transgressions of territorial sovereignty of one state by another,
as had been the routine during the Cold War. With a preponderance of power, the
U.S. embarked on a “new world order” in which its writ would reign supreme
as the world’s policeman. In the immediate post-Cold War years, the rules of
sovereignty were supposed to be enforced by the U.S., especially when its allies
were the defendants, to ensure peaceful international relations so that trade
and capital could flow unhindered across borders.
Today, as Russia toys with supine Georgia and a listless NATO, the global super
cop avatar of the U.S. has vanished into thin air. The disappearance has two
aspects — moral and material. It transpires that, of late, the policeman had
himself been wrecking the laws so blithely that he lost the moral authority to
cast aspersions on others. The U.S.’ violation of sovereignties of several
countries in the name of the ‘war on terrorism’ has downgraded the value of
the principle of territorial integrity and left it prey to the law of the
jungle. In May this year, the U.S. sanctioned violation of Ecuador’s territory
by its Latin American client, Colombia. The selectivity with which Washington
has defended sovereignty weakens the whole concept and leaves it open to
plunder.
By cheapening the territorial integrity vis-À-vis doctrines of pre-emption and
hot pursuit of terrorists, Washington has provided the argumentative basis for
Russia to absorb South Ossetia and Abkhazia and linger on in parts of Georgia.
Moscow’s claim that it has the right to target areas of Georgia from which
military threats emanate sounds reasonable in a climate of international
unaccountability engendered by the ‘war on terror’. If Russia does withdraw
from Georgian-populated territories, it will be out of prudence to avoid facing
a nationalist uprising, not due to respect for sovereignty.
Materially, the decline of American policing of different flashpoints of the
world is a factor of imperial overstretch and fighting on too many fronts. The
U.S. military is so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan that Mr. Putin was
assured of no swift NATO reaction to his deeds in Georgia. Moreover, since
Washington cannot begin bombing Iran when its forces are caught in other
quagmires, the U.S. needs Russian support to diplomatically isolate Iran for its
nuclear intransigence.
According to the International Herald Tribune, an unnamed United Nations
official is said to have joked that the U.S. was happy to let Georgia lose South
Ossetia as long as Russia voted in favour of censuring Iran. Had the U.S. won
decisive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would not find itself caught in this
complex web of linkage between Iran and the imbroglio in the Caucasus. Mr. Putin
is taking full advantage of Washington’s dependence on Russia to solve two
international problem cases — Iran and North Korea — and extracting his
pound of flesh against Georgia.
Saakashvili’s reckless ploy to integrate South Ossetia in a quick military
operation was predicated on expectations of backup from NATO, which never came.
Thus, the lesson of the war for other NATO aspirant countries in Eastern Europe
is that there is hardly any concrete security benefit of joining the U.S.-led
military alliance. With Washington having to beg fellow NATO members to increase
their contributions to Afghanistan, the alliance does not exude much confidence
to be an attractive option. By acting toughly against Georgian indiscretion, Mr.
Putin achieved a masterstroke of demonstrating the futility of joining NATO to
Russia-fearing neighbours. Further, he has redefined the extent to which these
countries can afford to become pro-western in their foreign policies.
With over 2000 civilian casualties incurred already in the sparsely populated
dispute zone of South Ossetia, the war in the Caucasus is undoubtedly a human
tragedy. Regionally, it has uncovered the continued pulls and strains of ethnic
nationalism in post-Soviet political space. Globally, it has revealed a
paralysed U.S. versus a rejuvenated Russia — a combination that confirms the
observable transition to a post-American world. (Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher
on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship in Syracuse, New
York.)
How a spat became a showdown in Georgia
HELENE COOPER | New York Times
Five months ago, President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, long a darling of
this city's diplomatic dinner party circuit, came to town to push for America to
muscle his tiny country of 4 million into NATO. At the White House, Bush
promised to push hard for Georgia's acceptance, and Saakashvili pronounced his
visit "one of the most successful visits during my presidency."
Three weeks later, Bush went to the Black Sea resort of Sochi and met with
President Vladimir Putin of Russia. There, he received a message: the push to
offer Ukraine and Georgia membership in NATO was crossing Russia's "red lines,"
according to an administration official close to the talks. Afterward, Bush said
of Putin, "He's been very truthful and to me, that's the only way you can find
common ground."
It was one of many moments when the United States seemed to have missed -- or
gambled it could manage -- the depth of Russia's anger and the resolve of the
Georgian president to provoke the Russians.
Miscalculation and missed signals
The story of how a 16-year, low-grade conflict over who should rule two
Caucasus regions erupted into the most serious post-Cold War showdown is one of
miscalculation, missed signals and overreaching, according to diplomats and
senior officials in the United States, the European Union, Russia and Georgia.
As with many foreign policy issues, this one highlighted a continuing fight
within the administration. Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies, who saw
Georgia as a model for their democracy promotion campaign, pushed to sell
Georgia more arms so that it could defend itself against Russia. On the other
side, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen
Hadley and Undersecretary of State William Burns argued that such a sale would
provoke Russia, the officials said.
They describe a collision course:
Bush, rewarding Georgia for its robust troop contribution to Iraq, promised
NATO membership and its accompanying umbrella of U.S. military support.
* Putin, angry at what he saw as American infringement right in his backyard,
decided that Georgia was the line in the sand.
* And Saakashvili, unabashedly pro-American, was determined to show that
Georgia was no longer a vassal of Russia.
The stars were aligned
In return for its troop contribution to Iraq, the United States provided
Georgia with more military training. But U.S. officials said they repeatedly and
bluntly told their Georgian counterparts that the arrangement should not be
taken as a sign of U.S. support for operations against the separatists.
Nevertheless, the foreign policy establishment worried the wrong signals were
being sent. "We were training Saakashvili's army, and he was getting at least a
corps of highly trained individuals, which he could use for adventures," said
one former senior intelligence analyst, who covered the region at the time. "The
feeling in the intelligence community was that this was a very high-risk
endeavor."
With a vastly more confident Russia, flush with oil money, a booming economy
and a military no longer bogged down in Chechnya, the stars were aligned for a
confrontation. "We have probably failed to understand that the Russians are
really quite serious when they say, 'We have interests and we're going to defend
them,'" said James Collins, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1997 to 2001. "Russia
does have interests, and at some point they're going to stand up and draw lines
that are not simply to be ignored."