TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Demonstrating Washington's commitment to beleaguered Georgia, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney flew in Thursday and condemned Russia for what he called an "illegitimate, unilateral attempt" to redraw Georgia's borders by force.
Speaking during a closely watched trip to this U.S.-allied South Caucasus nation, Cheney also assured Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili that the United States was "fully committed" to his country's efforts to join NATO.
"Georgia will be in our alliance," Cheney said.
One of the U.S. administration's most hawkish figures and a longtime critic of Russia, Cheney was visiting three ex-Soviet republics that are nervous about Moscow's intentions — Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine.
His trip signaled to Moscow that the United States will continue to cultivate close ties with Georgia and its neighbors even after Russia showed it was not afraid to use its military against countries along its border.
"America will do its duty to work with the governments of Georgia and our other friends and allies to protect our common interests and to uphold our values," Cheney said in a joint appearance with Saakashvili.
"Russia's actions have cast grave doubts on Russia's intentions and on its reliability as an international partner," Cheney added.
He told Saakashvili that the United States was at Georgia's side "as you work to overcome an invasion of your sovereign territory and an illegitimate, unilateral attempt to change your country's borders by force, that has been universally condemned by the free world."
On the eve of Cheney's arrival, the White House announced a $1 billion commitment to help the small but strategically located nation recover from its war with Russia.
"The free world cannot allow the destiny of a small independent country to be determined by the aggression of a larger neighbor," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Washington.
In his remarks Thursday, Cheney also thanked Georgia for sending troops to Iraq. Georgia has been the third largest contributor of troops to the U.S.-led operation there.
"Now it is the responsibility of the free world to rally to the side of Georgia," Cheney said
Saakashvili, meanwhile, said Georgia was committed to a peaceful resolution of its disputes with the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia, which has given military, political and financial support to the two areas, has recognized both as independent nations.
A day earlier in Azerbaijan, Cheney said Washington has "a deep and abiding interest" in the region's stability. Georgia hosts a critical oil pipeline that brings 1 million barrels a day from the Caspian Sea shores to Turkey, and on to Western Europe.
Cheney planned to make the massive U.S. aid package a major highlight of his meetings in Tbilisi, but it will likely leave unanswered the question of potential U.S. aid to rebuild Georgia's military.
Since the war in Georgia in early August, Russia has boldly asserted it has what President Dmitry Medvedev called "privileged interests" in its sphere of influence, which includes the former Soviet states in the Caucasus.
Military aid from the United States, with the help of some Western European countries, was key to transforming the Georgian army and navy from their ragged post-Soviet condition into a credible fighting force. Depleted by the war, it will need more Western aid to rebuild the military if it is to join NATO.
But angry Russian officials have repeatedly said that U.S. military aid was instrumental in emboldening Georgia to try to retake South Ossetia by force on Aug. 7. During the five days of fighting that followed, Russian forces routed the Georgian military from South Ossetia and drove deep into Georgia.
U.S. officials have placed at least part of the blame for the war on Russia, but new U.S. military aid to Georgia would further aggravate relations between Washington and Moscow, which are already at a post-Cold War low.
Russia has condemned the U.S. use of warships to deliver aid to Georgia as a form of gunboat diplomacy. The flagship of the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean, the USS Mount Whitney, arrived in the Black Sea on Wednesday with a cargo of aid.
The U.S. aid package is about the same as the estimate given by Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze of how much damage Georgia's economy suffered from the war.
Cheney arrived from neighboring Azerbaijan, the starting point for a major oil pipeline that crosses Georgia and ends in Turkey.
Because of the trip's itinerary, "we see this as a very clear sign that alternative energy routes and sources will be secured," Georgian national security council head Alexander Lomaia told The Associated Press.
The pipeline is the only direct route for Europe-bound Caspian oil to bypass Russia. Caspian oil also goes to Georgian ports by another pipeline and by rail.
Cheney is expected to spend only about four hours in Georgia. The stopover contrasts with U.S. President George W. Bush's exuberant visit in May 2005, when Bush spoke to a vast crowd in Tbilisi with Saakashvili.
Medvedev, meanwhile, harshly criticized the United States and urged the Washington to "reassess its relationship with the Georgian regime."
"The United States has actively helped Georgia build its military machine and pumped money and weapons into that," Medvedev said in an interview with Italy's RAI television.
"Regrettably, at some point they have given Mr. Saakashvili a carte blanche for any actions, including the military actions," he said.
Associated Press writers Jim Heintz and Misha Dzhindzhikashvili in Tbilisi; and Jennifer Loven and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this story.
Last month's Russian incursions into Georgia may have been "planned months in advance, awaiting only an appropriate pretext to act," according to EurasiaNet. Indeed, that Russia long had specific designs on Georgia has emerged as consensus in the wake of the conflict, at least among Western analysts.
Their proof? "Less than one month before Russia’s armed forces entered Georgia on August 8, they held massive military training exercises in the North Caucasus involving 8,000 servicemen and 700 pieces of military hardware." As a result, Russian troops were already in place, and primed for action, when Georgia attacked South Ossetian separatists.
Georgian military officials have inadvertently revealed that they had brought heavy artillery into the conflict zone very early on. For instance artillery brigade commanders told a Georgian newspaper that Georgian artillery used in the zone on August 7 included: "(a)t least 300 gun barrels of Georgian artillery."
Among these were: "the 203-mm Pion systems, the 160-mm Israeli-made GRADLAR multiple rocket launchers, the 152-mm Akatsiya, Giatsint and Dana (pictured) self-propelled guns, the 122-mm Grad and RM-70 multiple rocket launchers, as well as the D-30 and Msta howitzers of the infantry brigades." ["Georgian artillery inflicted 'heavy losses' on Russians," BBC Monitoring, August 25, 2008 translating Georgian weekly Kviris Palitra, August 25, 2008.]
It takes many days if not weeks to bring in the kind of heavy artillery about which the commander is talking into or near the conflict zone through the mountainous terrain around South Ossetia from Georgian army bases in Tbilisi, Senaki or Gori.
If Tbilisi indeed staged weeks early for a war with Russia, it raises the question of what went wrong. Did Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili honestly believe his tiny country stood a chance against Russia?
Hahn offers what he believes is key insight into Saakashvili's miscalculation. The Georgian president, Hahn claims, counted on a massive propaganda effort to draw the West into the war. "Saakasahvili and his ministers made numerous statements in their effort to convince the West that it was obliged to defend Tbilisi from Russia's incursion." More on that later.
Published: August 28 2008 18:37 | Last updated: August 28 2008 18:37
We need to get this straight. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has invaded a neighbour, annexed territory and put in place a partial military occupation. It seeks to overthrow the president of Georgia and to overturn the global geopolitical order. It has repudiated its signature on a ceasefire negotiated by France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and disowned its frequent affirmations of Georgia’s territorial integrity. Most importantly: all of this is our fault.
The “our” in this context, of course, refers to the US and the more headstrong of its European allies such as Britain. If only Washington had been nicer to the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall. If only the west had not humiliated Moscow after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Surely we can see now what a provocation it was to allow the former vassal states of the Soviet empire to exercise their democratic choice to join the community of nations? And what of permitting them to shelter under Nato’s security umbrella and to seek prosperity for their peoples in the European Union? Nothing, surely, could have been more calculated to squander the post-cold-war peace.
Such is the cracked record played over and over again by the Russian prime minister and recited now by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s notional president. Sadly, it also finds echoes among those in Europe who prefer appeasing Mr Putin to upholding the freedoms of their neighbours.
This Russian claim to victimhood is as vacuous as it is dishonest.
Mr Putin has said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Now he wants to subjugate his country’s neighbours in the cause of a greater Russia. The aim is to turn back the clock: to extend his country’s borders to create the greater Russia sought by the leaders of the abortive coup against Boris Yeltsin in 1991. The west must not collude with Mr Putin’s falsified version of history.
There is no doubt that Russians feel they suffered great hurt and indignity during the 1990s. They did. But it is a misreading of events to blame the US, the west, the EU or Nato.
The blindingly obvious point is that humiliation was inevitable and unavoidable. Until the collapse of communism the world belonged to Washington and Moscow. Suddenly almost everything was lost to Russia. The political and economic system that had once aspired to global domination was reduced to dust.
Open a history book. Humiliation is what happens when nations lose their empires. Ask the British. Half a century after Suez, part of the British psyche still laments this retreat from the world. You could say the same about the French.
The implosion of the Soviet Union could not stir anything but a sense of shame among Russians. But ah, you hear Mr Putin’s apologists say, the west fed Russian paranoia. For half a century central and eastern Europe had been signed over to Moscow. Now the west’s institutions rolled like tanks up to Russia’s borders.
The problem is that this account does not fit the facts. George H.W. Bush was anything but triumphalist in his response to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, the then US president faced sharp criticism from many Americans for refusing to dance on communism’s grave.
It is true Bill Clinton’s presidency began with some rhetorical flourishes about spreading democracy. And the US administration did press hard for the expansion of Nato, in part because the EU dragged its feet about opening its doors. Some doubted the wisdom of the Nato policy. George Kennan, the author of the cold war doctrine of containment, was among those arguing against Mr Clinton. But then, the revered Mr Kennan was not infallible. He had, after all, opposed the creation of the alliance.
Doubtless there were moments when the US, and Europe for that matter, could have been more tactful. The disciples of free markets dispatched to Moscow by the International Monetary Fund probably bear some blame for the catastrophic melt-down of Russia’s economy. But no, the historical record does not show a deliberate or concerted effort by the US or anyone else to mock or multiply Russia’s misfortunes.
When Mr Putin talks about humiliation, he means something else. Washington’s crime was to assume that the Yalta agreement had fallen along with the Berlin Wall, and that the peoples and nations of the erstwhile Soviet empire should thus be free to make their own choices.
In the Kremlin’s mindset, showing due respect for Russia would have meant allowing it to continue to hold sway over its near-abroad. The most that the citizens of Ukraine and the Baltic states should have expected was the ersatz independence now bestowed on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and the rest should have been locked out of western institutions.
Mr Putin has reopened the issue that seemed to have been settled in 1991 when Yeltsin saw off the tanks at the doors of the Russian White House. Yeltsin decided that the borders of the Russian Federation should follow those of the Soviet republics. That left the Crimea as part of Ukraine, Ossetia and Abkhazia as part of Georgia. Mr Putin’s doctrine is calculated to reclaim Moscow’s sovereignty over ethnic Russians in neighbouring states. This is a greater Russia by another means.
The doctrine overturns one of the central geopolitical assumptions of the past two decades: that, for all its hurt pride, Russia saw its role as a powerful player within a post-cold-war geopolitical order. Mr Medvedev, speaking with his master’s voice, now repudiates the laws and institutions of that order.
For all the occasional bluster about a new authoritarian axis between Moscow and Beijing, the contrast that has most struck me in recent weeks has been between China and Russia. Beijing saw the Olympics as a celebration of China’s return as a great power. China has by no means signed up to the norms and assumptions of liberal democracy; it has still to decide whether it wants to be a free rider or a stakeholder in the international system. But it has concluded that its future lies with integration into a stable world order.
Moscow’s invasion of Georgia and its public scorn at the likely international response speaks to an entirely different mindset: a retreat from integration and a preference for force over rules. Russia’s neighbours are told they can be vassals or enemies. Mr Medvedev boasts Russia is ready for another cold war.
I struggle to see what Russia will gain. It is friendless. Governments and foreign investors alike now know that Moscow’s word is worthless. The price of aggression will be pariah status. Mr Putin, of course, will blame the west.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the United States on Thursday of pushing Georgia toward war and said he suspects a connection to the U.S. presidential campaign — a contention the White House dismissed as "patently false."
In another sign of unraveling Russia-U.S. ties, Putin said that 19 U.S. poultry producers will be barred from exporting their products to Russia.
Putin, the former president and architect of an assertive foreign policy that stoked East-West tension even before Russia's war with the U.S.-allied ex-Soviet republic, suggested in an interview with CNN that there was an American presence amid the combat with a potential domestic U.S. political motive.
"We have serious grounds to think that there were U.S. citizens right in the combat zone," he said the interview broadcast on state-run Russian television. "And if that's so, if that is confirmed, it's very bad. It's very dangerous."
Putin's acid attack on the United States came as Moscow's bid to redraw Georgia's borders hit an obstacle among its Asian allies. France, meanwhile, said the European Union is considering sanctions against Russia for its conduct in the Caucasus.
The Russian leader said the poultry decision was unrelated to the Georgia issue. He said that the unnamed American producers ignored demands that they correct alleged deficiencies after examinations by Russian inspectors last year.
"We try and keep our industry out of politics and into marketing opportunities, but sometimes it's very difficult to separate the two," said Jim Sumner, president of the U.S.A. Poultry & Egg Export Council. He said Russia is a major market for American producers.
Putin said that Russia had hoped the U.S. would to restrain Georgia, which Moscow accuses of starting the war by attacking South Ossetia on Aug. 7. Instead, he suggested the U.S. encouraged the nation's leadership to try to rein in the separatist region by force.
"The American side in fact armed and trained the Georgian army," Putin said. "Why hold years of difficult talks and seek complex compromise solutions in interethnic conflicts? It's easier to arm one side and push it into the murder of the other side, and it's over.
"It seems like an easy solution. In reality it turns out that it's not always so," he said.
The United States has close ties with the Georgian government and has trained Georgian units, including for service in Iraq. But Russian officials have made statements aimed to convey the idea that Americans may have directly supported Georgia's offensive.
At a briefing Tuesday, the deputy chief of Russian military general staff, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, showed off a color copy of what he said was a U.S. passport found in a basement in a village in South Ossetia among items that belonged to Georgian forces.
"We found a passport for Michael Lee White," Nogovitsyn said. "He's a Texan."
The U.S. Embassy in Georgia said it had no information on the matter.
Putin appeared to link claims of an American presence amid the combat with a potential domestic U.S. political motive.
"If my guesses are confirmed, then that raises the suspicion that somebody in the United States purposefully created this conflict with the aim of aggravating the situation and creating an advantage ... for one of the candidates in the battle for the post of U.S. president." Putin did not name a party or candidate.
White House press secretary Dana Perino called Putin's contentions "patently false." She said "it also sounds like his defense officials who said they believe this to be true are giving him really bad advice."
She added: "To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate just sounds not rational."
Perino said Russia is facing the consequences of a diminished global reputation and that "there will be other" consequences as well. She refused to say what they would be and said there is no timetable.
Putin said the imminent ban on imports from 19 poultry producers was "purely economic." He said another 29 producers would receive warnings.
U.S. producers supply nearly 75 percent of the total poultry import quota set by Russia, which stands at 1.2 million tons. Russia represented the largest export market for chicken broilers made by U.S. producers in the first half of this year, said Jim Sumner, president of the U.S.A. Poultry & Egg Export Council
Sumner said he expected the alleged plant deficiencies to be corrected within weeks or a few months and said the stoppage would not have a major impact on U.S. producers.
In Tajikistan, China and four Central Asian nations joined Russia in criticizing the West. Wary of separatists and restive religious groups at home, however, they stopped short of heeding Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's call to carve out two new nations in a volatile region at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
Medvedev had appealed to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — whose members are Russia, China, and four Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — for unanimous support of Moscow's response to Georgia's "aggression."
But none joined Russia in recognizing South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, as independent countries.
"The participants ... underscore the need for respect of the historical and cultural traditions of each country and each people, and for efforts aimed at preserving the unity of the state and its territorial integrity," the declaration said.
The statement offered some praise of Moscow's actions, at least in the context of the peace deal signed five days after the war began. It said members welcome the cease-fire and "support the active role of Russia in promoting peace and cooperation in the given region."
But Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the summit highlighted Russia's isolation, noting that not even U.S. foes Cuba and Venezuela have followed Russia's lead on recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
"The Soviet Union was not so alone even in 1968," he said on Ekho Moskvy radio, referring to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed a liberal reform movement in the Warsaw Pact nation.
Western leaders have added condemnation of Russian recognition to their accusations that Moscow used disproportionate force in its Georgia offensive and has fallen far short of its withdrawal commitments under an EU cease-fire deal.
The EU is "trying to draw up a strong text signifying our unwillingness to accept" Russia's stance, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Thursday.
"Sanctions are being considered ... and many other means as well," Kouchner told a news conference. The Foreign Ministry said later that France was not behind a sanctions proposal and that France's role would be to help reach a common EU position.
Associated Press Writers Peter Leonard and Olga Tutubalina in Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Jim Heintz and Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili in Tbilisi, Georgia; and Catrina Stewart, Nataliya Vasilyeva, David Nowak, Doug Birch and Mansur Mirovalev in Moscow, and business writer Emily Fredrix in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
An explosion has ripped through a fuel train outside the Georgian town of Gori severing a vital trade route between the east of the country and Black Sea ports in the west.
Georgian officials suggested that the blast on Sunday morning could have been caused by a landmine planted on the line by Russian troops.
"The investigators have one key suspicion, it is that the Russian forces that left there two days ago have left a mine on the railroad," Shota Utiashvili, spokesman for Georgia's interior ministry, told Al Jazeera.
"About a week ago, on the same railroad a major bridge was exploded by the Russian invaders. And as they have left the area they have left mines."
Lado Vardzelashvili, the governor of the surrounding Shida Kartli region, said that the explosion took place near a military base which had been occupied by Russian troops. He said there were no casualties.
Intense fire
The Russian army pulled of Gori, a key town near the main road linking the capital Tbilisi with the Black Sea coast, on Friday as Russia called for a withdrawal to comply with a ceasefire deal agreed with Georgia.
There was no immediate comment on the blast from the Russian military or the government in Moscow.
Witnesses said that an intense fire was burning sending flames and thick dark smoke high into the air.
Omar Yuramashvili, a shepherd who saw the explosion, told the AFP news agency, that the train had been travelling west from Gori.
"When it went off it was the loudest explosion I've ever heard. The force was so great that some of the wagons were forced off the tracks," he said.
Lado Gurgenidze, Georgia's prime minister, said that the line, which runs through Tbilisi before splitting in three and running to the Black Sea ports of Poti and Batumi as well as southwest to just short of the Turkish border, was "vital".
"The railway is vital, not just for the Georgian economy but for the economies of neighbouring countries," he said.
US warship
Meanwhile, the first of three US vessels arrived in Batumi carrying humanitarian aid, including bottled water, blankets, hygiene kits and baby food for the tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting.
The USS McFaul, a guided missile destroyer, dropped anchor about 80km south of Poti, where Russian soldiers have been digging in for days.
The USS McFaul arrived in Georgia with humanitarian aid [EPA]
Al Jazeera's Neave Barker, reporting from Moscow, said that the Russian government considered the presence of the US vessel "very dubious indeed".
"This is a missile cruiser, it has Tomahawk missiles, it has an array of weapons on board ... no doubt this is going to be sending negative signals to the Russian command," he said.
The Russian defence staff said on Saturday that its troops would continue to patrol Poti, despite it lying outside a "security zone" in which Russia is deploying peacekeeping troops.
Late on saturday Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, called on Russia to further withdraw forces from roads linking Georgian cities.
Acting as chair of the European Union, Sarkozy "insisted on the importance of a rapid pullout of Russian soldiers present on the Poti-Senaki route," a statement from his office said.
Georgian authorities said that Russian forces were establishing checkpoints at eight locations skirting the breakaway region of South Ossetia and Georgia's main east-west highway.
The Russian military moved into Georgia more than two weeks ago in support of separtist forces in the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which had come under heavy bombardment from the Georgian army.
Moscow said it had completed its pullout from Georgia on Friday, abiding by its side of the European Union-sponsored six-point pact.
Is the world drifting towards a new global war? From this week the dominant super-power, America, will for three months pass through the valley of the shadow of democracy, a presidential election. This is always a moment of self-absorption and paranoia. Barack Obama and John McCain will not act as statesmen but as politicians. They will grandstand and look over their shoulders. Their eye will stray from the ball.
Meanwhile, along history’s fault line of conflict from Russia’s European border to the Caucasus and on to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, diplomats are shifting uneasily in their seats, drums are sounding and harsh words are spoken. The world is now run by a generation of leaders who have never known global war. Has this dulled their senses?
Dan McNeill, an American general, was recently interviewed in Kabul on how to beat the Taliban. He was not the first to conclude that this could not be done militarily but only by “winning hearts and minds”. The problem, he said, lay in the answer to the question, “Whose hearts and minds?” Was it those of the Afghan people or was it rather those of the American Congress and voters?
Both Obama and McCain have claimed that the war in Iraq has been allowed to distract attention from the war in Afghanistan. This is different from the neoconservatives, who felt the war in Afghanistan was a distraction from the more important war in Iraq.
America now thinks it has won in Baghdad and must return to Kabul - and possibly even Tehran. At the same time it must face the possibility that these conflicts may in turn be a distraction from the reemergence as world powers of Russia and China, who are already gaining the initiative in Iran and Africa. Moscow is also precipitating a nationalist resurgence in eastern Europe and among Russian minorities in the Caucasus.
The question is critical. Has the West misjudged the fault line of an impending conflict? Its global strategy under George Bush, Tony Blair and a ham-fisted Nato has declared the threat to world peace as coming from nonstate organisations, specifically Al-Qaeda, and the nations that give them either bases or tacit support. Western generals and securocrats have elevated these anarchist fanatics to the status of nuclear powers. Policing crime has become “waging war”, so as to justify soaring budgets and influence over policy, much as did America’s military-industrial complex during the cold war.
Might it be that a raging seven-year obsession with Osama Bin Laden and his tiny Al-Qaeda organisation has blinded strategists to the old verities? Wars are rarely “clashes of civilisation”, but rather clashes of interest. They are usually the result of careless policy, of misread signals and of mission creep closing options for peace.
Terrorists, wherever located and trained, can certainly capture headlines and cause overnight mayhem, but they cannot project power. They cannot conquer countries or peoples, only manipulate democratic regimes into espousing illiberal policies, as in America and Britain. By grossly overstating the significance of terrorism, western leaders have distracted foreign policy from what should be its prime concern: securing world peace by holding a balance of interest - and pride - among the great powers.
To any who lived through the cold war, recent events along Russia’s western and southern borders are deeply ominous. Moscow initially spent the 17 years since the fall of the Soviet Union flirting with the West. It had been defeated and had good reason for disarming and putting out feelers to join Nato and the European Union. It took part in such proto-capitalist entities as the G8.
In the case of Nato and the EU it was arrogantly rebuffed, while its former Warsaw Pact allies were accepted. Moscow was told it would be foolish to worry about encirclement. A nation that had never enjoyed democracy should content itself with basking in its delights. Russians in the Baltic states and in Ukraine should make their peace with emerging governments. The political clutter of the cold war should be decontaminated.
Suddenly this has not worked. The world is showing alarming parallels with the 1930s. Lights are turning to red as the world again approaches depression. The credit crunch and the collapse of world trade talks are making nations introverted. Meanwhile, the defeated power of the last war, Russia, is flexing its muscles and finding them in good working order.
On Thursday Gordon Brown told his troops in Afghanistan that “what you are doing here prevents terrorism coming to the streets of Britain”. He cannot believe this any more than do his generals. Afghanistan poses no military threat to Britain. Rather it is Britain’s occupation and the response in neighbouring Pakistan that fosters antiwestern militancy in the region. Like the impoverishment of Germany between the wars, the stirring of antiwestern and antiChristian sentiment in the Muslim world can only be dangerous and counter-productive. Yet we do it.
The Taliban are fighting an old-fashioned insurgent war against a foreign invader and recruiting Pakistanis and antiwestern fanatics to help. They have succeeded in tormenting Washington and London with visions of a destabilised nuclear Pakistan, a blood-drenched Middle East and an Iran whose leaders may yet turn to jihad. For Brown - or the American presidential candidates - to imply that these conflicts with the Muslim world are making the world “safer” is manifestly untrue.
Worse, it distorts policy. Rather than calming other foes so the West can concentrate on the conflicts in hand, it is pointlessly stirring Russian expansionism to life.
There is no strategic justification for siting American missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. It is nothing but right-wing provocation. Nato’s welcome to Georgia and Ukraine, for no good reason but at risk of having to come to their aid, has served only to incite Georgia to realise that risk while also infuriating Moscow.
Russia is well able to respond recklessly to a snub without such encouragement, so why encourage it? The more powerful state - America - surely has an obligation to show the greater caution. Any strategic decision, such as the goading of Moscow, must plan for its response. Nato’s bureaucracy, lacking coherence and leadership, has been searching for a role since the end of the cold war. That role is apparently now to play with fire.
Western strategy is dealing with a resurgent, rich and potent Russia. It has played fast and loose with Moscow’s age-old sensitivity and forgotten the message of George Kennan, the American statesman: that Russia must be understood and contained rather than confronted. The naive remarks welcoming Georgia to Nato by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, show a West far detached from such analytical truths.
Any student of McCain or Obama, of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, or of the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, might conclude that these are not people likely to go to war. They are surely the children of peace. Yet history shows that “going to war” is never an intention. It is rather the result of weak, shortsighted leaders entrapped by a series of mistakes. For the West’s leaders at present, mistake has become second nature.
Fortunately, the Russia-Georgia war was short-lived, but its repercussions will be felt for quite a long time. By defeating Georgia and showing that Washington was unable to defend its own ally, Russia humiliated the United States in front of the whole world.
While U.S. officials and the global media criticized Russia for its "unforgivable" conduct in invading South Ossetia and Georgia, most of the world was filled with delight: At last, someone put high-handed Americans in their place. Against the background of anti-U.S. sentiment during President George W. Bush's two terms in office, this desire to snub the United States is not surprising.
Perhaps Georgia deserves some sympathy. After all, it is a small country that tried to resist its powerful neighbor. But the conflict was less about Georgia and South Ossetia than it was a global battle between East and West.
Russia won the latest round with unexpected ease, but this will surely not be the final battle. After experiencing an embarrassing humiliation, the Bush administration will have difficulty forgiving Russia. Even worse, the U.S. government's indignation has turned into an anti-Russian consensus among Washington politicians and their electorates. As a result, the anti-Russian views of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain hardly differ from those of Bush. Coming from U.S. politicians, however, the argument that Georgia's territorial integrity should be preserved doesn't sound very convincing. After all, it was the United States that set an example after it invaded sovereign Iraq and overthrew the local government. It later separated Kosovo from sovereign Serbia.
The war with Georgia was a sharp turning point in U.S.-Russian relations. From now on, the desire to punish Moscow will become an important component of U.S. foreign policy. The underlying conflict of interests will turn into a protracted confrontation.
Paradoxically, this conflict will most likely turn out to be good news for Russia. What Washington thinks is punishment for Moscow may in fact turn out to be a blessing. For example, the United States believes that blocking Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization is one way to retaliate. But for Russia's domestic industries -- particularly when there is a global economic downturn -- entry into WTO would be a death sentence. Therefore, if this sentence will be postponed, the Kremlin can only thank the United States and Georgia.
In addition, Washington and London are threatening to investigate the bank accounts of senior Russian officials that are held abroad. It's surprising that this wasn't done earlier. Russians can only benefit if the United States leads a new fight against money laundering, particularly when it involves top officials from the Russian government. Moreover, NATO is threatening to suspend joint military exercises with Russia. That means Russia will save a nice amount of money and fuel. Finally, in light of the increased tension, liberal opposition groups in Moscow will receive more active help from the West. This is also beneficial because new financing will mean the creation of new media outlets, new nongovernmental organizations and new jobs.
When it condemned Russia's incursion into Georgia, the United States appealed to international public opinion and threatened Moscow with global isolation. But it is the United States that will becoming increasingly isolated in the world. Over the last five years, Washington has met worldwide criticism, including from its allies in Europe. As a result, Moscow's heightened conflict with the United States makes Russia more appealing for a significant part of the world. The question is only whether the Kremlin is able to take advantage of this new opportunity.
Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies
CRAWFORD, Texas — The United States on Sunday accused Russia of stalling its military pullback in Georgia, but the Bush administration is not rushing to repudiate Moscow for its actions.
The White House is struggling to figure out the best way to penalize Russia. It doesn't want to deeply damage existing cooperation on many fronts or discourage Moscow from further integrating itself into global economic and political institutions. At the same time, U.S. officials say Russia can't be allowed to get away with invading its neighbor.
Fighting broke out after Georgia launched a massive barrage Aug. 7 to try to take control of the separatist province of South Ossetia, which is heavily influenced by Russia. The Russian army quickly overwhelmed Georgia's forces, then drove deep
into the country, bombed Georgian ports and military installations and tied up an east-west highway through the nation.
The New York Times, citing anonymous U.S. officials who were familiar with intelligence reports, reported Sunday that the Russian military moved missile launchers into South Ossetia on Friday.
The U.S. officials told the Times that Russia deployed several SS-21 missile launchers to positions north of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. That would put the missiles within range of Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, the Times reported on its Web site.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who briefed President Bush on the fast-changing crisis over the weekend at his Texas ranch, said, "There's no doubt there will be further consequences" to Russia.
She returned to Washington on Sunday and is flying to Brussels, Belgium, on Monday to talk with NATO allies about what message the West should send to Russia.
Rice is then flying to Warsaw, Poland, where she will sign a formal agreement with Poland for the establishment of a missile interceptor site there. Moscow has protested the U.S. plans for such a base so close to its borders.
Russia can't use "disproportionate force" against Georgia and still be welcomed into the halls of international institutions, Rice said.
"It's not going to happen that way," she said. "Russia will pay a price."
But neither Rice nor Defense Secretary Robert Gates would be specific about what punitive actions the U.S. or the international community might take.
"We're going to take our time and assess what further consequences there should be to the relationship," Rice said.
The United States wants to take a tough stance against Russia, but there is much at stake.
"The facts are that the United States has to work with Russia on Iran, on nuclear problems of proliferation, on a whole raft of trade issues at a time in which the United States has a huge domestic deficit," said Sen. Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And holding open the prospect of taking steps against Russia gives the United States some leverage in pushing Russia to withdraw from Georgia. But nothing is expected to happen in a hurry, and the United States doesn't want to turn the conflict into a fight between the former Cold War rivals.
"There is no need to rush into everything," Gates said. "We don't want to do it unilaterally.
"I think there needs to be a strong, unified response to Russia to send the message that this kind of behavior, characteristic of the Soviet period, has no place in the 21st century," he said.
Asked whether Russia should be kicked out of the Group of Eight major industrialized states, or whether it should be kept from joining the World Trade Organization, Gates replied vaguely, saying the U.S. and its allies can choose from a broad menu of possible punitive steps. Russia already is feeling repercussions, he said.
"The whole world is looking at Russia through a different set of lenses than just a week and a half or two weeks ago, so there are already consequences," Gates said. "I think they may not appreciate the magnitude of those consequences yet. The longer they take to get out and to observe the cease-fire that's been declared and the arrangements that have been worked out, I think the greater those consequences will be."
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Russian troops will begin leaving Monday, but made no mention of leaving the separatist province at the heart of the conflict between the countries.
The Bush administration is hopeful yet skeptical that Russia will honor its pledge to withdraw troops quickly from Georgia under terms of a cease-fire it signed Saturday.
"My own view is that the Russians will probably stall and perhaps take more time than anybody would like," Gates said. "I think we just need to keep the pressure and ensure that they abide by the agreement that they've signed and do so in a timely way."
The Russians say they're going to take their time in leaving the South Carolina-sized democracy that declared its independence in 1991.
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee, said Russian forces will be out of Georgia "sooner or later," but how much time it takes depends on how Georgia behaves.
Echoing Bush's call to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq depending on conditions on the ground, Kosachev said: "If I would ask you ... `How fast the American forces can leave Iraq?' ... the answer would be, as soon as we have guarantees for peace and security there.
"The same answer would be toward this situation: as soon as we are assured that Georgians will not continue to use military force against South Ossetians and against Abkhazians" — residents of two separatist areas of Georgia now overrun with Russian troops and abandoned by Georgian soldiers.
Rice and Gates pressed the administration's case during appearances on five Sunday talks shows — Rice on "Fox News Sunday," CBS' "Face the Nation" and NBC's "Meet the Press," and Gates on ABC's "This Week" and "Late Edition" on CNN. Kosachev and Lugar also appeared on CNN.
It seems now that what you say about the Russian invasion of Georgia depends on where you think "there" is. U.S. President George W. Bush would have it be in Europe, in order to make the crisis to appear more historically momentous, and to make his call for its NATO membership to sound more strategically convincing.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would rather follow in the footsteps of the czars, who since the day of Peter the Great have eyed that mountain nation as part of their natural southern border, and think of Georgia as being in Russia's "near abroad," with the implied warning to others -- Stay out!
Students with a long view of history point out that Georgia is properly in the Caucasus – that hopeless checkerboard of cross-purposed nationalities, the triumphant ones with newly recognized countries of their own, and the still vanquished ones currently without, yet ever hopeful of even further ethnic subdivision. Not for nothing did the early Arab geographers call the Caucasus "jebel al-lisan," or "the mountain of languages."
Israelis might have the most succinct label for it -- "a bad neighborhood" -- yet it goes unsaid just how much responsibility the Israelis themselves have for making their own neighborhood so.
Bush and Putin both have a lot to lose if they don't get it geographically their way. If Georgia is in fact part of Asia, closer to Baghdad than to Brussels, then Bush's tough talk of Russia's unacceptable policy of regime change, military invasion, and the targeting of civilians gets uncomfortably close to U.S.-approved invasions of Iraq, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, etc.
Conceding Georgia as being in the Caucasus leads to the equally hypocritical parallel of Armenia's occupation of the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which for 18 years has been tacitly approved in Washington because of much muscle flexing by the Armenian-American lobby.
If, on the other hand, Georgia is considered to be squarely part of Europe, then Putin will be seen as spearheading yet another Prague '68, Hungary '56, or Sudetenland '38 -- just as American neocons are now calling it in their effort to get key European allies to buy into their rhetoric. Sarko l'Américain already has. Yet what might a loyal NATO ally like Turkey, whose territory is all to the west of Georgia, have to say about this -- especially when told by many that they are not sufficiently "Western" to qualify for EU membership?
Isn't there a better place for Georgia -- in neither Europe nor Asia? From now on, why not think of the Black Sea as the Russian Caribbean, and let Georgia be renamed the Cuba of the Caucasus? Turn it into a fully fledged U.S.-allied junior NATO member and give it a few rusty missiles pointed north. U.S. military advisors are conveniently already in residence there.
Just as Soviet advisors in Havana learned to love Cuban rum and say no to Russian vodka, U.S. soldiers stationed in Tiblisi these days are said to much prefer Georgian wine over American beer.
Elect a Georgian nationalist version of Fidel Castro -- in fact, current President Mikhail Saakashvili will do fine -- to shake his fist at Moscow in every speech and then rattle his tin cup for Western aid.
Cede Abkhazia and South Ossetia outright to Tiblisi, and let their refugees flood into nearby Sochi, already a palm-planted resort town much like Miami, which will then become a hotbed of cross-border conspiracy, nostalgia, and irredentism -- and a serious political headache for Moscow if the day ever dawns when Russia and Georgia decide to make peace.
The parallels between Georgia and Cuba are already striking. Both are rentier states, dependent on fees collected for leasing out their real estate to others -- Georgia as a pass-through along Big Oil's Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline, and Cuba as a vacation spot formerly for Soviet-era commissars in guns-for-sugar swaps, and more recently for hard currency-carrying sex tourists from Europe.
Georgia curried favor with its American client by sending its troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to help spread democracy at gun point, just as Cuban soldiers and fighter pilots aided the Soviets in their efforts to hurry up the inevitability of communism in Africa.
Yet this current crisis in Georgia can only bring to mind the Cuban missile crisis of yesteryear, which now has the bluffing, blustering, and eventually backing down Bush playing the part of the United Nations. Security Council shoe banging Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who allowed himself to be outplayed and outsmarted by the virile John Kennedy.
Like Putin and unlike Bush this time round, Kennedy before he came to office did truly have experience of the real world, where the personal consequences of one's own decisions in war are sometimes bloody and sometimes lethal. President Bush in a newly tailored, never before worn flight suit, permitting photo-ops on the deck of an aircraft carrier off the Pacific coast of San Diego, will never understand this.
The US administration urged for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the unrecognized republic of South Ossetia.
In the meantime, Russian officials believe that it was the USA that orchestrated the current conflict. The chairman of the State Duma Committee for Security, Vladimir Vasilyev, believes that the current conflict is South Ossetia is very reminiscent to the wars in Iraq and Kosovo.
“The things that were happening in Kosovo, the things that were happening in Iraq – we are now following the same path. The further the situation unfolds, the more the world will understand that Georgia would never be able to do all this without America. South Ossetian defense officials used to make statements about imminent aggression from Georgia, but the latter denied everything, whereas the US Department of State released no comments on the matter. In essence, they have prepared the force, which destroys everything in South Ossetia, attacks civilians and hospitals. They are responsible for this. The world community will learn about it,” the official said.
In the meantime, it became known that the Georgian troops conducted volley-fire cleansings of several South Ossetian settlements, where people’s houses were simply leveled.
“The number of victims with women, children and elderly people among them, can be counted in hundreds and even thousands,” a source from South Ossetian government in the capital of Tskhinvali said.
The head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Sergei Lavrov, told reporters that Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia question its consistency as a state and as a responsible member of the international community, Interfax reports.
"Civilians, including women, children and elderly people, are dying in South Ossetia. In addition to that, Georgia conducts ethnic scouring in South Ossetian villages. The situation in South Ossetia continues to worsen every hour. Georgia uses military hardware and heavy arms against people. They shell residential quarters of Tskhinvali [the capital] and other settlements. They bomb the humanitarian convoys. The number of refugees continues to rise – the people try to save their lives, the lives of their children and relatives. A humanitarian catastrophe is gathering pace,” Russia’s Foreign Minister said.
The minister added that the Georgian administration ignored the appeal from the UN General Assembly to observe the Olympic truce during the Beijing Olympics.
Zaman selepas Bom Atom Hiroshima tahun 1945, penuh dengan peperangan dengan inisiatif Amerika.
Terkini adalah rangkaian peperangan sekitar laut Caspian.
Ramai sudah lupa tentang Mass Destruction Weapons milik Sadam Hussein sebagai penyebab Amerika secara unilateral menyerang Iraq.
Sadam sudah mati digantung, MDW tidak dijumpai, tetapi Amerika masih di Parsi.
Penganalisis sering mengaitkan Perang Iraq sebagai pengukuhan Amerika keatas dominasi sumber tenaga. Disitu ada minyak yang banyak. Iraq dan Afghanistan berada dalam rangkaian pengaliran minyak dari sekitar laut caspian ke dunia luar.
Sumber tenaga alternatif iaitu Nuklear juga dalam kawalan Amerika. Oleh yang demikian Iran perlu disekat Amerika dari terus maju dalam bidang nuklear.
Russia bukanlah sebuah negara kecil. Russia, satu-satu negara yang telah bergiat melengahkan perang Amerika keatas Iran.
Perang Georgia adalah balas dendam Russia keatas seterunya, Amerika, dan negara-negara sekutu.
Dengan ketenteraan yang terikat di Iraq dan Afghanistan, Amerika tidak mampu berbuat apa-apa. Negara-negara di Eropah selepas ini dijangka akan lebih berbaik dengan Russia.
Bila Amerika berusaha meletak mana-mana pemimpin dalam sesebuah negara, sering rakyat melihat dengan sinis. Permainan dominasi Amerika sangat ghairah.
Sementara Anwar Ibrahim selalu dikatakan sebagai ejen kuasa asing iaitu Amerika, suka diingatkan orang Permatang Pauh tentang dominasi kuasa stail Amerika. Sudah berjuta umat Islam tumbang ke tanah.
Tetapi bagi mereka yang ghairah ingin berkuasa, apa mereka peduli?. Diperingkat tinggi, orang jarang jujur kerana mereka bawa pisau lipat enam mata.
By wagering on NATO's lack of military options to confront Russia's actions in Georgia, and by controlling the bottleneck of energy flow to Europe through the Caucasus pipelines, Russia's new ruler Vladimir Putin has nearly put the finishing touches on America's downfall from its status as the world's only superpower, a process that began with its war in Iraq, or at least that is what he thought. Putin has wagered on Washington's military being tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on Europe's internal division regarding the results of the US's unilateral adventure in Iraq. He has estimated that the US would lack the political and diplomatic influence, and that it would lose its prestige upon abandoning, in practice, democracy's spoiled child in Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashavili.
The US's decision regarding Russia's confrontational strategy (instead of giving priority to partnership) has its perspectives and implications not only in the context of bilateral relations between the two countries, or on the relationship between NATO and Russia's neighbors in the Caucasus. It also affects the position and status of the US all over the world, including the Gulf region with its oil and gas, and the Middle East with its conflicts.
Astonishment and verbal protestation will not be sufficient for a man of steel such as Putin, with his Soviet background, Russian nationalism, vast oil resources, and strategic oil partnerships with the likes of China and Iran. Retreating to the front, or escaping to the back, is the impression accompanying American and European responses, deepening the impression that the US has become a paper tiger, and Europe a wildcat that toys with the tiger but fears the Russian bear in its own home, which is why it will not dare to be defiant.
Given such a situation, it seems to some that the unipolar era is over, that a new world order is taking shape under Russia's leadership and that the US has run out of options. Yet, what will happen if the US decides take the initiative to use Iraq, as it had envisioned, as an unparalleled military base, and to redeploy its forces by tactically withdrawing its troops to aircraft carriers, informing all those concerned that it has decided to exercise what military might it has and that its hands are not tied?
What will happen if the US informs its NATO allies that Afghanistan is their mission and their responsibility, to free US troops of the military burden and remove its reputation for having its hands tied? What if Washington decides that the partnership with Russia over resolving the nuclear crisis by offering incentives to Iran has become ineffective, as Moscow has taken itself out of the partnership and exhausted diplomacy to serve Tehran's interest in buying time and stalling while reinforcing its nuclear capabilities and expanding its influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, which the Islamic Republic of Iran has transformed into an Iranian base through Hezbollah?
The cost of these options should be considered on the basis of the cost of avoiding them. In other words, the US and Europe should carefully consider what to do with Putin's Russia, if they refuse to confront the fundamental message behind Russia's actions in Georgia, namely:
* Teaching every country in Russia's neighborhood the lesson that it must remain Moscow's friendly and obedient ally, and that it will not be allowed to become an ally of the US or a member of NATO.
* Informing Washington that it will not be forgiven for the mistake it made with Kosovo, and that revenge from Russia's perspective today is far more important than the partnership which was so important for Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Things are different now, and the scope of such revenge will not be limited to the Caucasus but will reach the US wherever it finds the need to, in the Caucasus, Iran or elsewhere.
* Taking a qualitative step forward, in the framework of its oil and gas strategy, by securing Russia's control over the bottleneck of pipelines stretching across Georgia to Turkey which supplies Europe with its energy needs. Additionally, several major European countries, such as Germany, rely on Russia's gas for over 40% of their needs. Russia has laid an important foundation for its strategic decision to regain its former grandeur, namely that of oil alliances and gas balances.
The matter is not limited to Mikheil Saakashvili's excesses in South Ossetia or his miscalculations. It is rather about the meaning of submitting to Russia's response to what Moscow has described as adventures that must be stopped by any means necessary, including military incursion into Georgia's territories to teach it a lesson and to control the future of its pipelines. The leadership in Tbilisi, on the other hand, claims that Russia has set up a strategy of escalation and begun to provoke Georgia, and that Georgia had no choice but to defend itself.
Saakashvili has suffered great disappointment, as the US and Europe have, in practice, abandoned him. Perhaps he had believed that responding to Russia's show of power with a show of power of his own would automatically lead to partnership and accelerate Georgia's admission into NATO. So far, his wager seems to have failed on both counts.
What has taken place in Georgia constitutes a building-block in the grand Russian strategy set up by Putin in Russia's immediate neighborhood and on the international level. It would be wrong to believe that developments will be limited to the Caucasus or to Georgian territory, as Iran is the next stop in this strategy.
If Washington yields and behaves on the basis that its options are limited and costly and that it has no choice but to plead with Europe for salvation and bow down before Moscow, then the worst is yet to come. If those Americans who are angry at George Bush and his war in Iraq release their anger by rewarding Russia and Iran, and reinforcing their ability to expand, dominate, use threats and intimidation, revive the Soviet spirit, and mobilize allies on the basis of enmity to the US, it would be as if one were to chop off his nose to get back at his face.
There is now an urgent need for deepened strategic thinking regarding the American-European relationship, in the wake of the Iraq war in which the neoconservatives implicated the US. Such a war was a desperate decision which turned Iraq into a slippery step which may topple the US from its position of sole superpower. While the anger is well-founded, the challenges of the day demand far more than confining ourselves in blame and anger, and drawing lists of non-options. It is of the utmost necessity to formulate a comprehensive strategy towards Russia and Iran, at some point after the Iraq war, especially in the era of oil alliances and at a time when revenge is being employed as a fundamental political tool.
Moscow is not only taking revenge for Washington's mistake of supporting Kosovo's independence from Serbia, a measure which Moscow considered to be a direct insult, but also for the war in Iraq, of which excluding Russia from the country and its resources was a fundamental element. For two American errors, there were two Russian acts of revenge. And then there is Iran, where the matter is radically different, and where revenge takes a regional dimension, with a Russian-Iranian partnership directed against the US, based on exploiting American involvement in Iraq.
Vladimir Putin did not dwarf the US and turn it into a second-class country by his mere genius, but he intends to take advantage of the opportunity to abuse a dwarfed US to increase the possibilities of restoring Russia's grandeur. If he is met by apologies, he will move forward undeterred, supported by dangerous and violent nationalism. Only then will remorse catch up with those who focused the blame on Bush's adventures in Iraq and his mistakes in Kosovo, blame which he has certainly deserved, but without examining the designs of those benefiting from such errors and adventures, most particularly Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Europeans in turn have the responsibility of careful examination, rather than simply following the trend of chewing hatred and blame for Bush and the US. They are on the verge of the worst economic recession in a Europe dependent on Russian gas. Today they have caught a glimpse and are now familiar with who Vladimir Putin is, how he thinks and how he acts.
When Putin resorted to military force against Chechnya, the world did not take notice of his military tendency to resolve problems by undermining diplomacy. Today, and merely to spite the US, many Muslims forget that Vladimir Putin has repeatedly taken violent military stances against Muslims in Chechnya and elsewhere, and celebrate his violence to compensate for their constant failure.
If the response is silence, fear, retreat and accepting that there is no other choice but submission, it will constitute a meaningful strategic message, not only to Russia but also to Iran, allowing them to further pursue their ambitions of regional hegemony. This is not an invitation to rush to military options against Iran or to a display of power directed at Moscow. However, both options are available, if the US wishes to resort to them, at a cost.
Perhaps the developments in Georgia will lead to seriously considering early withdrawal from Iraq to redeploy American troops on aircraft carriers where the US's naval military might is unparalleled. Such a measure would put an end to the impression that the US has no other choice but to submit. Tactical withdrawal from Iraq would free Washington's hands and enable the US to act confidently at sea.
The other option could be to stop saying and pretending that Iraq is not a military base for the US, and instead to behave in the opposite manner. In other words, it is perhaps time to cause a qualitative shift in the debate over US military capabilities inside Iraq, to turn them away from the dilemma of having their hands tied and to emphasize the importance and usefulness of Iraq being, in practice, an American military base that could be activated whenever the US's needs and higher strategic interests would demand it.
Riding to war in Georgia alongside a bloodthirsty and vengeful gunman, Mark Franchetti saw at first hand how one small conflict in a faraway country led to a superpower confrontationVadim, a South Ossetian militiaman, raced through the deserted Georgian streets, a Soviet Makarov pistol in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. Dishevelled, unshaven and wild-eyed, he was searching for someone to kill. For the first time in 10 years he had crossed the border from his secessionist province and reached Gori, a town well inside Georgian territory, hours after it had been taken by Russian soldiers.
Wounded in the fighting, he had a gaping bullet hole in his upper thigh; but the pain only fuelled his thirst for revenge. As I sat by his side, he drove his battered Lada at high speed through Gori’s bombed-out centre, often screeching to a halt to scour the side streets and buildings in search of defeated Georgian soldiers.
“This has been building up for years,” he said. “I knew it would happen and I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. If I see a Georgian soldier I’ll shoot his brains out. They’re dogs.”
As heavy artillery rounds exploded on the edge of town, we came across other civilian cars and minivans with Russian numberplates crammed with Vadim’s fellow South Ossetian militiamen. Like Vadim, who was in a tattered camouflage uniform and white trainers, they looked wild and menacing. They wore white armbands to identify them to the Russian army as friendly forces.
Some hid their faces behind black balaclavas. It was the day after Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, had called an end to military operations in Georgia. American humanitarian aid was flowing in. Yet the Russians still occupied about a third of Georgia with impunity and Vadim and his cohorts were on the rampage in horrifying scenes that evoked the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Not only had America and its Nato partners been shamed by the invasion of a country that had been welcomed into the western embrace, but they had also shown themselves incapable of sending home the Russians and their henchmen. This humiliation raises far-reaching questions about American power, Russian revanchism and Europe’s sometimes craven relationship with the Kremlin.
However, the most important question is one that Washington seems unable to answer: what is its long-term purpose in relations with Russia? Does America want Moscow as a global partner, particularly in the war on terror and in repressing Iran’s nuclear ambi-tions? Or is it pursuing a strategy of containing the Russian bear by close alliances with neighbouring countries that were once Kremlin satrapies?
“Realist” diplomats from Henry Kissinger downwards are pointing out that America can’t do both because a contained Russia won’t be a cooperative Russia. However, if Georgia were to join Nato, the consequence could be a much more serious confrontation with Moscow, as the alliance works on the understanding that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Is the invasion of Georgia the first step towards an armed confrontation between America and Russia?
On Friday, Russia even threatened Poland with nuclear retaliation for agreeing to host US rockets as part of its antimissile shield. Not that Vadim cared about the geo-political picture. He shouted obscenities at a frightened young woman as we drove by in a side street.
“Wouldn’t mind f***ing one of these Georgian girls,” he said. When the history of the conflict comes to be written, it may be that a small incident on the road linking Georgia to Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, will be identified as the starting point of war. The US State Department’s internal timeline of the crisis pinpoints the explosion on August 1 of two roadside bombs, believed to have been planted by South Ossetian separatists sympathetic to Russia, as a decisive moment. Five Georgian policemen were injured, one severely.
That night Georgian forces struck back. There was a furious firefight that left six South Ossetian rebels dead. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, was on holiday. A few new provocations by the South Ossetians did not appear to warrant her coming home. The US intelligence services had been warning that the Russians were preparing for war, but it did not occur to them that fighting would break out just as the world was settling down to watch the Beijing Olympics.
It now appears that August 1 was a well-prepared “provocation” – one of the Kremlin’s favourite tactics. Pavel Felgengauer, a Moscow authority on military affairs, claimed in Novaya Gazeta that the plan was for the “Ossetians to intentionally provoke the Georgians” so that “any response, harsh or soft, would be used as an occasion for the attack”. At last Russia was going to teach the Georgians a lesson. Moscow’s relations with the tiny nation of 5m had begun to deteriorate when Mikhail Saakashvili swept to power nearly five years ago.
A US-educated lawyer aged 40, Saakashvili is fervently pro-western. Washington has encouraged his aspirations to join Nato and has helped to train the Georgian army with the help of the Israelis. President George W Bush visited Georgia, promising to stand by it, and relations between Saakashvili, the State Department and the Pentagon have been close. Vladimir Putin has watched the process with mounting anger.
Moscow argues that while it pulled back its troops from eastern Europe and allowed American forces into central Asia to fight in Afghanistan, the Americans have been invading its traditional sphere of influence.
“It’s a very emotional issue,” said a western diplomat. “Most Russians, not just the Kremlin, see Georgia as part of their world and take the fact that most Georgians aspire to join Nato as an act of betrayal. Add the paranoia about the West wanting a weak Russia and conspiring to encircle it and you have an explosive situation. On the other hand, Georgians clearly aspire to closer relations with the West because they fear Russia.”
Saakashvili has long vowed to bring South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another pro-Russian separatist region flanking the Black Sea, back under Tbilisi’s control. His populist pledge is supported by most Georgians. “Georgia is nothing without Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” said Levan, a Georgian trapped in Gori when the Russians moved in last week.
“Imagine someone came and ripped your arm off. That’s what it’s like for us. These two regions are an integral part of Georgia and must be returned to us.”
The stakes were raised this year when Kosovo gained independence, prompting Putin to increase support for Georgia’s breakaway republics. That came as an increasingly bullish Saakashvili prepared an assault to retake parts of Abkhazia. Western diplomatic sources last week revealed that in early May, Washington had put frantic pressure on the Georgian leader to stop him launching military operations.
“They only just managed to stop him,” said a source.
By the summer, attention had switched to South Ossetia. Russians and Georgians accused each other of straying into each other’s territory. Rice told Saakashvili at a private dinner on July 9 not to respond with military force. However, while she thought that her message was loud and clear, Saakashvili went on to thank her warmly for her “unwavering support for Georgia’s territorial integrity” and may have interpreted it as permission to act as he pleased. Within three weeks the clashes of August 1 had raised tension again.
Rice remained on holiday while Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary of state, took the role of keeping Georgia calm. Saakashvili also spoke on the phone to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, which holds the European Union presidency, and to Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief.
Western sources say neither they nor the Americans could restrain him; but the Georgian leader last week angrily said he had repeatedly warned Washington and EU countries that the Russians were preparing a military operation against Georgia but that he had been brushed aside.
On August 7 Fried took a call from Eka Tkeshelashvili, the 31-year-old Georgian foreign minister, who told him Russian tanks were advancing on South Ossetia in what appeared to be preparations for an attack. Fried warned her to avoid war but the message did not sink in, sources say. Ariel Cohen, a Russian expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, said there should have been direct talks with Saakashvili.
“They needed to be at a very high level, not at the level of Mr Fried. The American position should have not just been clear, but imperative.” A few hours after the call to Fried, in the early hours of Friday August 8, Georgia launched its offensive in South Ossetia, killing many civilians; and Russia responded with a huge show of force, bombing Georgia and invading a sovereign country for the first time since it seized Afghanistan in 1979.
TSKHINVALI lay in ruins last week, bearing evidence of both the Georgian attack and the Russian counterattack. The remains of Georgian armoured vehicles lay upside down close to the central square. Witnesses told of cars filled with fleeing Ossetian refugees being shelled by Georgian tanks.
They claimed that in one incident Georgian soldiers finished off the wounded by pouring fuel over them and burning them. Independent human rights observers confirmed that civilian targets had been repeatedly hit, including basements where terrified residents had sought refuge and were trapped for days. Moscow has claimed that some 2,000 people died at the hands of Georgian forces – including 15 Russian peacekeepers.
However, Human Rights Watch, the American group, said that Russian estimates were “suspicious”. Doctors at the main hospital said that 44 dead had been brought to the city morgue. Whatever the final death toll, few dispute that the city suffered destruction and that civilians were hardest hit. Nor is there any doubting Albina Shanazarov’s tragic fate. A 13-year-old girl, she sought to flee the city with her mother and three sisters. They set off with other civilians in a bus, which was ambushed by Georgian forces as they tried to reach Russia.
“A bullet smacked right into the steering wheel. I had to stop and we scattered along the highway,” said Guram Beloyev, the bus driver. “It was dark and I was hoping they wouldn’t see as we hid but they must have been using night-vision goggles because the Georgian sniper fired pretty accurately. Albina was terrified and ran towards me. That’s when she was hit by a bullet that smashed right through her chest. She died almost at once.”
The survivors managed to escape but had to abandon Albina’s body. It was recovered a day later by her father, Charshanbe Shanazarov, a colonel in the South Ossetian police, who said he came across two shattered taxis filled with civilians who had been killed as they tried to flee. He also found more bodies along the road, in all counting 15 dead civilians, including two children. He buried his daughter in his garden because reaching the town cemetery was still too dangerous.
“They murdered an innocent 13-year-old girl. For nothing. They took her away from me for ever. Why?” Each side blames the other for starting the fighting, but a western diplomat who has had extensive contact with the Georgians, said: “Whatever the truth, the Russians have done everything they could to provoke the Georgians into doing something. Saakashvili appears to have fallen straight into their trap and frankly I imagine Putin could not believe his luck when he received the first report of fighting.”
A western mediator, who knows Saakashvili well, said that the West should have insisted on more checks and balances being introduced to control the Georgian leader’s hot temper. “He is high maintenance – very emotional – and can get carried away,” said the source. “He likes confrontation. The other problem is that he makes decisions with a kitchen cabinet of only four or five people sitting in his office at 5am, determining the fate of the nation. Decision-making is bound to suffer.
“The Russians have been provoking him big time and he has been held back many times. On this occasion he failed to keep his cool and did exactly what the Russians wanted him to do – overreact.”
America had sleepwalked into a foreign policy disaster and its response was slow and uncertain. With Bush tarrying in Beijing watching the Olympics while Putin executed a war, Americans were reminded uncomfortably of Hurricane Katrina – another occasion when Bush dithered before eventually getting around to sending humanitarian aid.
Ralph Peters, a former military intelligence analyst, said last week at a symposium on Georgia at the neoconser-vative American Enterprise Institute: “The image for me will be the president going to a basketball game and flirting with the beach volleyball team.”
He added: “Vladimir Putin is the most effective leader in the world today. Nobody comes close. In contrast, President Bush is looking like Jimmy Carter when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It’s tragic.”
Bush had thought he had Georgia in his pocket. Saakashvili is surrounded by US civilian and military advisers and is so close to US politicians that John McCain, the Republican nominee, claimed last week to be in daily telephone contact with him. However, he is regarded as “mercurial” – a polite way of saying that the Americans lost control of their client. “We’d been warned about Saakashvili for some time. Our advisers knew he wasn’t ready for prime time,” said Peters. “But he’s the democratically elected leader of Georgia.
The Russians knew they could poke him and poke him until he responded.” It was the Europeans who moved first in trying to stop the fighting. At the Olympic opening ceremony on August 8, Sarkozy bumped into Putin soon after news of Georgia’s offensive in South Ossetia started coming in. “Sarko” was with 11-year-old Louis, his youngest son, and the Russian prime minister wrapped the boy in a bear hug.
Nearby, Bush was looking through binoculars at the Olympic parade. “Listen,” Sarkozy told Putin, “it’s a mistake by Saakashvili. We have to find a way out of this crisis.”
An implacable Putin replied: “I can’t let it happen.” After returning from China to France, Sarkozy called Angela Merkel of Germany, Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, Spain’s Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and 10 Downing Street to try to work out a European reaction to the fighting. In reality, the crisis had split Europe along the fault line that has divided it since the Iraq war. Germany, with its close commercial ties to Russia, wanted a “no blame” solution.
Poland empathised with Georgia, and Britain stood by Washington in firmly condemning the invasion. France not only has a policy of engagement with Russia but was also enjoying taking the diplomatic front seat. Sarkozy got back on the phone to Medvedev in Moscow.
The Russian president wanted Saakashvili “fired” but Sarkozy told him that was not a helpful condition. “It’s not up to you or me to designate the Georgian leader,” he told the Russian. Washington apparently tried to persuade Sarkozy not to go to Moscow to talk to Russia’s leaders face to face.
Bush warned him: “You’ll arrive at the Kremlin when the Russians are firing missiles at Tbilisi.” Sarkozy went anyway and was apparently told by Putin at a working lunch in the Kremlin on Tuesday: “It’s just like in the films – there’s a good cop and a bad cop”, referring to himself and Medvedev.
Even so, the “nice” Medvedev did not mince his words. In a press conference later that day he referred to Saakashvili as a madman. “The difference between madmen and normal people,” he explained, “is that madmen, when they smell blood, it is very difficult to stop them.”
Despite the rhetoric, Russia accepted an EU-sponsored accord. “For the first time in a major international crisis, it is the Americans who are on the touchline and it is the European Union that is being called upon to sort things out,” crowed a French presidential aide. Well, perhaps: the Russians might have agreed to a deal but they had not yet delivered on it.
GORI is a town of more than 50,000 people, 40 miles north of Tbilisi. When I entered it on foot last Wednesday, five days after the Russians’ invasion, their troops were advancing rather than withdrawing.
A few hours earlier a column of Russian armoured personnel carriers, mounted with large calibre machineguns and carrying hundreds of troops, had crossed the border despite assurances from Moscow that it would not stray into Georgia proper. They took Gori without fighting, as Georgian troops fled in their thousands.
Plumes of black smoke rose on the edge of town as Russians took up position on a ridge, setting fire to the surrounding fields. As I walked by the roadside towards the city, armoured vehicles packed with soot-covered Russian soldiers cradling AK47s and grenade launchers rumbled past, their tracks crushing the asphalt. One came to a halt and its commander offered me a lift. I jumped on the back and rode a couple of miles towards the town centre.
“The Georgians asked for it,” Sergei, a soldier from Siberia, yelled over the engine. “They came into Tskhinvali, destroyed it and killed a hell of a lot of civilians. What did they expect – for Russia to sit back? As far as I’m concerned we should go all the way to Tbilisi and take the city. We should wipe them out and teach them not to mess with Russia.”
Famed as Stalin’s birthplace, Gori was a bustling community before hostilities broke out. Last week it was a ghost town. I passed blackened apartment blocks that had been hit by Russian bombs. Laundry was still hanging out to dry, abandoned in the panic. I came across fewer than 100 people.
“We haven’t eaten in three days; do you have any bread? Please help,” said an elderly woman dressed in black who was too scared to try to leave the town. A small group of men huddled in a yard, looking shellshocked and incredulous at the sight of Russian tanks taking up positions a few hundred yards down the road. Koba, a 35-year-old worker, said they had spent much of the past two days hiding in their cellar for fear of Russian bombing.
“My father is blind,” he said. “He wanted to stay and I couldn’t leave without him. The past few days have been terrifying. I never thought I would live to see such a day. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined seeing Russian tanks rumbling through our town.”
As I reached Gori’s main square, famed for its imposing statue of Stalin, the thud of artillery shells filled the air and sent a bearded priest in a black robe and a small family carrying a few possessions running for cover. A few days earlier a Russian shell had killed at least eight civilians as they were being given bread and water.
A minivan carrying half a dozen heavily armed South Ossetian militiamen sped across the main square, coming to a halt when they spotted me. The gun-men, some in masks, asked me if I had seen any Georgian soldiers. One insisted on giving me a handful of chocolates before the group raced off. Minutes later Vadim, the militiaman, pulled up. “Jump in. Have you got any bandages?” he asked. “I’m wounded.”
He took me to a nondescript single-storey house. He said he had intelligence that it had been used as a Georgian arms depot. Limping because of his wound, he walked up to the heavy metal gate, handed his Kalashnikov to me before I could decline and tried in vain to break its lock with a hunting knife he kept strapped to his side.
He then grabbed back his AK47, cocked it and fired 10 rounds at the lock from only a few yards away but, despite shattering it, was unable to enter the building. He later enlisted the help of two regular Russian soldiers in a heavy truck, who were stopped by an angry officer as they prepared to ram the vehicle into the building.
When I last saw Vadim, as I made my way out of the town on foot, he was making advances to a middle-aged Georgian woman as she collected water from a hose in her yard. I did not witness any serious abuse of civilians in Gori, but there were numerous witness accounts pointing to a paramilitary campaign of revenge attacks against Georgians in South Ossetia.
“A group of heavily armed and wild-looking South Ossetian irregulars came into the village and started terrorising people and looting,” said Niko Markuzash-vili, 52, who had fled the Georgian hamlet of Kheltubani and walked to Gori.
“They were burning houses and stealing cars, just grabbing anything they wanted. I saw them stop a man in his car. They demanded the keys but he refused to hand them over so they shot him point blank with a machinegun and killed him on the spot. They took some of the young men prisoner.”
As panicked civilians fled the area, most on foot and carrying only the clothes they were wearing, people told of young girls being abducted and men being detained. Houses were systematically looted and torched. Entire villages were razed. Too frail to leave, some elderly locals have stayed behind and now have neither food nor shelter. Exhausted villagers from Dvani, a Georgian village in South Ossetia, gathered by the road side, desperate to hear whether loved ones had managed to escape. They had walked 11 miles in searing heat.
“They are coming to our villages, burning our houses and killing people – so we had to escape,” said Vano Bezhanishvili, 37, who said he had been lucky to make it out alive when paramilitaries who entered Dvani on two trucks began shooting, in one incident killing a man when he looked out of a window and shouted at them. Most disturbing were reports that in some incidents the paramilitaries had taken young women as sex slaves.
“A car with a family fleeing their village was stopped by the militias,” said Georgy, a Georgian army commander. “They grabbed the man’s two young daughters and dragged them away at gunpoint. Their father could do nothing to stop them. We have no idea what’s happened to them. They have disappeared.”
In South Ossetia itself, vengeful militiamen were moving into deserted ethnic Georgian villages on what they said was a mopping-up operation to “find Georgian sabo-teurs and looters”.
As they advanced they carried out widespread looting and burnt houses in an apparent ethnic cleansing campaign to ensure locals did not return. A group of militiamen held a Georgian soldier prisoner in the back of a truck, his mouth covered with a filthy T-shirt to block out the stench of two rotting corpses lying beside him – fellow Georgian soldiers clad in Nato camouflage uniforms.
“I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t kill your women and children. I swear,” he said, pleading with his captors to spare him. Inal, a militia sergeant, was in no mood for concessions. “You’re going to be dumping your comrades’ bodies soon, you faggot, where we only bury stray dogs. And that’s where you are soon going to join them.”
The prisoner was made to drag the dead men off the truck and to bury them in a ditch with the corpses of eight other Georgian soldiers. Some were stripped naked and charred. One had his mouth still open in a grimace of terror and pain. “Tell us the f***ing truth. Where is your weapon? Where are your documents? If you don’t tell us the truth, we’ll shoot you dead,” Inal, 47, yelled at the prisoner, who claimed to have been responsible only for food and transport. Inal was unconvinced. “We’ll talk to you properly back at the base. Then we’ll see if you are telling the truth.”
The road to the military base deep inside Russian-controlled South Ossetia was scattered with rotting Georgian corpses. Inal paraded two more prisoners – both middle-aged men. One, with a scar across his nose and broken lips, was shaking in fear as Inal began the interrogation. He sat both men on the ground and took off the safety catch on his Kalashnikov.
The two Georgians, who were not wearing military uniforms, said they were builders from a nearby hamlet who had been caught in the fighting and had lost their IDs. Yelling, Inal hit one hard in the face. The man groaned in pain and cowered behind his friend’s shoulders.
“Where is your weapon, you faggot?” Inal barked, threatening to drown the man in a pool. But another South Ossetian soldier stopped Inal and handed the prisoner a Nato ration pack. “Made in the USA! Enjoy!” he laughed. At first the Russian army appeared unable or unwilling to control the militias. On Thursday, after the Russian interior minister said looters should be dealt with severely, soldiers blocked the road from South Ossetia into Georgia to paramilitary forces and arrested several looters.
AMERICA now has to decide how to contend with the newly resurgent Russia and with a self-confident Vladimir Putin. Whether he is called president or prime minister is immaterial. He is “Tsar Vladimir” or, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “Vladimir Bonaparte”. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, ruled out the use of force last week to compel Russia to return to the status quo ante.
For now the two breakaway provinces are back in Russia’s orbit, and a question mark hangs over the future of Georgia and other former Soviet satellite states. Some American commentators believe that their country’s performance has been shameful. Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, said: “The Iron Lady would never have stomached this sort of behaviour by the Russians. She would have issued an immediate statement condemning Moscow, summoned an urgent meeting of the Nato command and demanded that the Russians halt their advance and withdraw their forces or face the consequences."
According to Gardiner, “The whole episode has demonstrated to eastern Europe that America and Nato won’t protect it. It sends the message that it is open season on any of the border states and that the West doesn’t have the stomach to protect them.”
The rapid conclusion of long negotiations between America and Poland to site American missile defences on Polish territory last week showed the gravity of the crisis for countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain. “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later. It is no good when assistance comes to dead people,” said Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister.
The historian Leon Aron, an expert on Russia, said: “The next target of opportunity is Ukraine – not the entire country, but the Crimean peninsula and Sebastopol, which is home to the Black Sea fleet.” There is talk about suspending Russia’s membership of the G8 or boycotting the 2014 winter Olympics, which will be in Sochi, in southern Russia; but the Bush administration has preferred to utter general warnings about Russia’s imperilled standing in the world rather than to deliver specific threats to curb its behaviour.
“Will Nato and the EU draw the conclusion that we should stay away from the former Soviet states in order not to be drawn into a conflict, or will they decide that they ought to offer them the protection of membership? I’m not optimistic,” said Aron. Bush has barely five months of his presidency left – not enough time for a tired administration, still grappling with Iraq, Iran and the intractable Palestinian problem, to come up with a coherent policy on the resurrection of Greater Russia. It seems certain that Vadim and his ragtag cohorts will be celebrating the events of August 2008 for years to come.
Dmitry Beliakov in Tskhinvali, Sarah Baxter in Washington, Matthew Campbell in Paris and Nicola Smith in Brussels contributed to this report
