LESSONS FROM THE WAR IN GEORGIA
By Herbert Bix
Asia Times Online
Oct 22, 2008
Hong Kong
The five-day Russo-Georgian war in the Caucasus brought into sharp
focus many conflicts rooted in the region’s history and in aggressive
US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) policies since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Notable among these were the military
encirclement of Russia and attempts to control energy resources of
areas previously dominated by the Soviet Union.
The net effect of the conflict has been to hasten a dangerous new era
of rivalry between the world’s two most powerful nuclear states, one
that will be shaped hereafter by the current global recession and the
changes it is bringing about in the economic practices of all states.
Former US president Bill Clinton’s use of force in Kosovo in 1999
was crucial in precipitating this situation. At the time, the
United States thrust aside international law and the primacy of
the UN Security Council, with Clinton justifying war as a means of
establishing a more humane international order. Every civilian death
that resulted from it became "unintentional collateral damage",
morally justifiable because the end was noble.
By substituting a quasi-legal, moral right of humanitarian intervention
for the long-established principles of national sovereignty and
respect for territorial integrity, US-NATO aggression against Serbia
prepared the ground for US President George W Bush’s unilateral
military interventions.
Now, bogged down in illegal, unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
US government suddenly appears to have rediscovered the usefulness of
the international law norms it defied in Kosovo. But it has invoked
the principle of state sovereignty selectively, attacking Russia
for its intervention in Georgia while simultaneously sending its own
armed forces and aircraft on cross-border raids into Pakistan.
Quest for full dominance The search for causes of the Georgia conflict
has brought to the fore America’s quest for unchallengeable global
military dominance, which requires the Pentagon to plant military
bases at strategic places around the world and Congress to pass
ever-larger military budgets.
In 2002, Bush adopted the Pentagon strategy, which was first formulated
a decade earlier by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. It planned to
make the United States the world’s sole superpower, deterring foes
and allies alike from aspiring to even regional dominance. When,
in pursuit of this ultimate goal, the United States pushed NATO
further eastward toward the borders of Russia while pouring money
and armaments into Georgia and training the Georgian army, it paved
the way to the August war.
Or, more precisely: the Russo-Georgian war exhibited the features
of a proxy war pitting US-NATO imperialism against Russian
nationalism. Russian forces thwarted Georgia’s armed provocations and
issued a challenge to American and NATO policies in the borderlands.
Another disruptive trend highlighted by the war is the increasingly
fierce competition between US and Russian corporations for control
of Caspian Sea and Central Asian oil and gas resources. Georgians,
Ossetians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and other peoples in the eastern
Caspian Sea basin are hapless pawns in this continuous struggle,
which affects their territorial and ethnic conflicts in ways they
cannot control.
The struggle over oil and gas has led the US Central Command,
originally established to deal with Iran, to extend its operations
from the Middle East to the oil-and-gas-rich Central Asian and Caspian
Sea states of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan,
underlining the geopolitics that lay behind the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars, and now the Russo-Georgian war.
When Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dimitry
Medvedev ordered Russian forces to move through South Ossetia and cross
the border into Georgia, they violated the UN charter. Their initial
justification – defense of the Ossetians’ right of self-determination
– was as arbitrary as the one the United States and NATO put forward
for their attacks on Kosovo and Serbia, where unlike in Russia’s case
their self-defense was never involved.
So, in responding unilaterally to a very real threat that had actually
materialized, did Russia commit an act of aggression? Neither the
UN Security Council nor the General Assembly could make that legal
determination. Even if they had, Russia wouldn’t have taken seriously
a US-NATO charge of aggression that served only to emphasize its
accusers’ egregious double standards.
In the course of conducting the war, Georgian ground troops, tanks
and some South Ossetian militia deliberately targeted civilians,
committed acts of ethnic cleansing and wantonly destroyed civilian
property in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, and in villages
along South Ossetia’s border with Georgia proper.
Legal scholar Richard Falk argues that Russia too targeted "several
villages in the region populated by Georgians". If so, there is little
evidence that Russia carried out anything like ethnic cleansing. If
Russians committed war crimes, they pale in comparison to the crimes
the United States and its allies perpetrate every day on Iraqi and
Afghan civilians. But, as Falk says, all such charges should be
investigated regardless of their magnitude.
The crisis in the Caucasus highlighted the narrow, nationalist mindset
of Western policymakers and many of their publics’. Secessionist
movements exist in many of the multiethnic satellite states of the
former Soviet Union, where Russians are in the minority. American and
NATO policymakers and neo-conservatives have been only too eager to
exploit them.
But once Russian tanks and ground forces moved into Georgia,
abruptly halted US-NATO encirclement, and exposed the limits of
American military power, the Western mass media immediately poured
fiery scorn on "brutal Russia", while ignoring, firstly, Georgia’s
role in starting the conflict, and secondly, US and Israeli military
support for Georgia.
President Mikheil Saakashvili made it easier for them to cover the
war by hiring Aspect Consulting, a European public relations firm
that sent in a top executive to disseminate daily, sometimes hourly,
falsehoods about rampaging Russians attacking Georgian civilians.
American journalists fostered Russophobic sentiment by disseminating
completely one-sided war news, demonizing Russia as the evil aggressor,
and championing "democratic", peace-loving Georgia. The American
business magazine Fortune decried the bear’s "brutishness" and its
threat to an interdependent world; Forbes labeled Russia "a gangster
state" ruled by a "kleptocracy".
TV newscasters likened the Russian Federation to Nazi Germany at
the time of the 1938 Munich crisis. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice even asserted an American moral right to lecture Russia on
how a "civilized country" should behave in the 21st century. All of
which led Russia’s former president Putin to comment sarcastically,
"I was surprised by the power of the Western propaganda machine
… I congratulate all who were involved in it. This was a wonderful
job. But the result was bad and will always be bad because this was
a dishonest and immoral work."
The war Virtually everything about the Russo-Georgian war is contested,
especially the question of who started it. But an abundance of
published evidence contradicts Georgian propaganda and indicates that
Saakashvili provoked the war with encouragement and material support
from the Bush administration.
Years earlier, Saakashvili’s regime had drawn up plans for invading
South Ossetia, which had been seeking independence from Georgia
continually since 1920. He was emboldened to implement those plans –
in the midst of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games – because he expected
aid from American and NATO allies, whose Afghanistan and Iraq wars
he was supporting with 2,000 Georgian troops.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe military
observers stationed in landlocked South Ossetia reported that
"shortly before midnight on August 7", Georgian forces fired the first
shots. Before that time Russian jets had occasionally entered Georgian
airspace. There had been minor skirmishes between South Ossetians
and Georgians, and Georgian spy drones had flown over Abkhazia,
which has important ports on the Black Sea.
These actions didn’t start the war. What did was the late-night
bombardment and ground offensive, ordered by Saakashvili, in which
US and (to a lesser extent) Israeli-trained Georgian army units used
rockets, heavy artillery and Israeli-supplied cluster bombs to attack
Tskhinvali and kill Russian soldiers.
It’s hard to gauge the resulting scale of death and physical
destruction from the Georgian army’s bombardment and land assault,
which targeted not only Russians and Ossetians but also fellow
Georgians living in South Ossetia. Russian officials initially claimed
that the Georgian attack killed an estimated 2,000 South Ossetians
who were Russian citizens.
Later underestimates in London’s Financial Times suggested the assault
killed "at least 133 civilians" and 59 Russian peacekeeping forces. The
same article estimated 146 Georgian soldiers and 69 civilians were
killed in the subsequent Russian mass invasion and bombardment. Russia
lost four planes and an unknown number of airmen in that attack. Some
30,000 South Ossetians who fled into North Ossetia, plus the Georgians
living in Abkhazia and South Ossetia who were driven from their homes,
must also be counted among the victims of the war.
On October 9, at the World Policy Conference in Evian, France, Medvedev
announced that Russia had vacated the buffer zones in Georgia a day
in advance of the deadline specified in the armistice agreement. For
this he was commended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who,
for the first time, publicly censured Georgia for its "aggression".
But tensions between Europe and Russia are certain to continue as
long as the United States persists in using Georgia and Ukraine to
advance its national policies, while tensions between Georgian forces,
Ossetian soldiers and Russian peacekeepers also remain undiminished.
A new chapter in the conflict between NATO and Russia, however,
has definitely opened, signaled by Mevedev’s speech to Europe’s
leaders. He reiterated that Russia was "absolutely not interested
in confrontation" and called on them to forge "a new global security
framework that would challenge the United States’ ‘determination to
enforce its global dominance’".
Meanwhile, the Russian people have lost their remaining illusions about
the West, and Russia’s leaders must now worry about zones of ethnic
conflict spreading from the North Caucasus through the Black Sea region
to Central Asia and beyond, returning to the limelight other potential
flashpoints like Nagorno-Karabakh and Yakutia in the Far East.
Behind the war Russia’s conflicts with the non-Russian peoples of the
Caucasus go back centuries, but the developments that led directly
to the Russo-Georgian war start with the breakup of the Soviet
Union. The Soviet collapse ignited euphoria among the American and
European elites. Many felt they would now be able to redesign Europe
without having to take into account the preferences of the Russian
giant on their doorstep. While admitting Russia to full membership
in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and
making hard currency loans to it, they quickly began to chart a new
offensive mission for NATO.
Russia plunged into a protracted, multi-sided decline. It abandoned its
dominant position on both the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. Azerbaijan,
Armenia and the five ex-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan emerged as independent
states, eager to attract Western investment, and some even receptive
to hosting American military bases. Ukraine, which owns the Crimea,
where Russia bases its Black Sea fleet, proclaimed its independence
in 1991 and soon thereafter expressed a desire to join NATO. Poland
joined both NATO and the European Union (EU) in 1996.
Once Eastern Europe became wide open to Western economic intervention,
Russia could do little to prevent the region’s elites from gravitating
towards full incorporation in the US empire.
Economically, Russia was sorely beset. Under former president
Boris Yeltsin it had chosen to shift rapidly from over-reliance on
central planning to embracing capitalist markets. Its huge economy
contracted. Its armed forces and navy decayed. Social pathologies
of every kind deepened. Many Russians experienced acute economic
hardship while a handful seized opportunities to purchase state-owned
enterprises, enrich themselves overnight, and enter the class of
Russia’s new elite.
This era of rapid economic redistribution, national humiliation
and social disintegration lasted for about eight years. By 1999
expectations began to rise, driven by rapid economic growth. Russia
soon paid off its debts. It didn’t, however, recover from its
enormous demographic decline. No longer a military superpower, its
leaders saw themselves as a nation-state faced with special security
concerns because it spanned Eurasia from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific
coast, shared borders with 14 other states, and had nuclear weapons
capability. Over the next few years Russia’s self-confidence grew
and its booming market economy allowed it to reappear on the world
stage as a major energy exporter to Europe.
Popular protests in Georgia led to the toppling of its government in
2004. Dubbed the "Rose" revolution", this political change was funded
partly by the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (a
semi-official non-governmental organization and Cold War relic from the
Ronald Reagan era), and the billionaire investor and political activist
George Soros. Overnight, American propaganda turned the autocratic
state of Georgia into a "beacon of liberty", a "democracy" with a
"free-market economy" deserving to be supported for NATO membership
despite its ongoing ethnic conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Americans, through their "democracy-promoting" organizations,
played a similar role in funding the peaceful "Orange" revolution"
in Ukraine. First, they helped the anti-Russian Viktor Yushchenko
rise to the presidency in a politically divided country, less than
half of which leaned toward the West; then, they supported Ukraine’s
right to apply for NATO membership.
For more than a decade, Russian leaders had repeatedly objected to US
efforts to turn its neighboring states into US clients. But recognizing
their own national weakness and the growing interdependence of nations,
Russian leaders knew their options were limited. They had to work with
Washington and, in principle, were committed to doing so. However, as
American leaders pursued their quest for global military dominance,
and as they and EU leaders pushed NATO ever closer to Russia’s
borders, the leadership in Moscow came to believe they had made too
many compromises on vital security interests to stay in Washington’s
good graces. Just how far could statesmanship and international law
go in safeguarding Russia’s borders? Or in preventing Georgia from
being turned into the "Israel of the Caucasus"?
Consequences Fallout from the war was felt first in the Caspian Sea and
Black Sea regions. Azerbaijan, which since 1994 had allowed Western
companies to develop its gas and oil resources, decided to lower its
reliance on the trans-Caucasus oil pipeline from its port of Baku
to Georgia, and make a small but permanent increase in oil shipments
to Russia and Iran. "We don’t want to insult anyone … but it’s not
good to have all your eggs in one basket, especially when the basket
is very fragile," said the vice president of Azerbaijan’s state oil
company. Kazakhstan’s reaction was to enter into talks with Moscow on
"new export pipelines to Russia" now that their Georgia route had
become less secure.
Georgia, which the United States valued primarily to control gas
and oil pipelines to Azerbaijan and Central Asia, and which Israel
supported as a market for arms sales and in hope of obtaining
use of airbases from which to attack Iran, has been shorn of
its small autonomous enclaves. Although its impetuous strongman,
Saakashvili, has redoubled his efforts to secure membership in NATO
and military-economic assistance from the West, neither the EU nor
NATO is likely to admit Georgia in the near future, let alone allow
Saakashvili to manipulate them. Georgia’s resounding defeat has
diminished the importance of its pipelines.
Russia showed the world that it would shed blood to prevent further
security threats from developing on its own borders, though it would
not wage war on a genocidal scale for the sake of controlling foreign
oil, as the United States has done in Iraq. Russia also demonstrated
that it could at any time end Georgia’s role as a secure energy
corridor through which gas and oil was piped, via Turkey, to the
West. At the same time, Putin took pains to reiterate points he and
other Russian leaders had been making to Washington for years: namely,
there was no need for confrontation and certainly "no basis for a
cold war" or "for mutual animosity". Putin insisted that "Russia has
no imperialist ambitions".
Indeed, Russia’s aims were very limited. For nearly two decades it had
tried unsuccessfully to get the United States and EU to recognize its
national security needs and build a real partnership. South Ossetia,
which had long been pro-Moscow, didn’t want to become part of Russia,
though Abkhazia did. But Russia had no intention of annexing either
region and exposing itself to the charge of territorial expansionism.
Russia’s answer to the Kosovo precedent was to grant formal recognition
of their de facto independence and to sign friendship treaties
with South Ossetia’s leader, Eduard Kokoity, and Abkhazia’s Sergei
Bagapsh. The treaties included pledges to defend them by stationing
troops in each region and building military bases. At the signing,
Medvedev reiterated, "We cannot view steps to intensify relations
between the [NATO] alliance and Georgia any other way than as an
encouragement for new adventures."
But did the Georgian military campaign make Russia more secure from the
threat of a nuclear attack? Did it shatter the curve of encirclement
the United States and NATO were constructing around it? The Georgian
aggressor was easily "punch[ed] in the face" (Putin’s stern words).
Yet when looking at US-NATO policy, Russia’s leaders see that they
have not stopped NATO’s eastward drive and the American implantation
of anti-ballistic missiles in Poland. The danger remains of the
United States spreading an arms race through the Caucasus and in
Europe generally.
NATO defense ministers, coming at this from a confrontational angle,
recently reviewed plans to establish a "rapid-response" military force
to fight Russia’s future military actions. Medvedev’s September 26
announcement that Russia would build a "guaranteed nuclear deterrent
system" and a new "aerospace defense system" – and have it in place
by 2020 – should be read as a response to the Georgian war and Western
encirclement, even though the planning preceded the crisis. Just when
Russian leaders need to invest more in modernizing infrastructure
and improving the lives of the Russian people, they’re forced to cope
with the determined efforts of the top US and EU leaders to surround
them with military bases and nuclear missiles.
Russia can’t ignore the threat of economic and diplomatic isolation
for the South Ossetians and Abkhazians. Their inability to secure
international recognition will make it harder for them to prosper,
whereas Georgia is already the recipient of a large IMF loan and new
promises of EU and American aid. To see Georgia made into a Western
showcase state while Ossetia and Abkhazia languished would further
harm Russia’s image in the West.
In the process of defending its borders from a real security threat
Russia, partly through its own actions, has suffered a setback in the
court of world opinion. Only tiny Nicaragua joined it in formally
recognizing the two breakaway republics. The major Western powers
refused to accept the validity of the border changes that the war had
brought about. South Ossetia and Abkhazia met the factual criteria
for statehood, but not the European and American political criteria
for recognition.
The consensus of US and NATO leaders was that they lacked real
independence from Russian control and didn’t respect the rights of
their minorities, as if the Kosovar Albanians in Europe’s new colony
respected the rights of their Serb and Roma minorities. One cannot
fail to see the blatant hypocrisy of this stance given US-NATO practice
with respect to the successor states of the former Yugoslavia.
On the other hand Russia’s position, which holds that Georgia forfeited
its claim to these territories by its abuse of the Ossetians and
Abkhazians, is equally hypocritical in the light of Putin’s brutal
suppression of Chechnya’s secession movement. It also looks two-faced
to Serb eyes, especially because recognition of the new Caucasus
states appears to violate the principle of territorial integrity, thus
undermining Russia’s previous moral opposition to the Kosovo precedent.
Confrontational response What may be one of the most dangerous outcomes
of the Georgia-Russian war is the hectoring, confrontational way
the Bush administration and American politicians have responded to
it. While locked into a self-defeating "war on terror", overstretched
militarily and weakened by the deepening global economic crisis,
the United States persists in extending its sphere of influence into
the Black Sea region.
The Bush administration wants to hold on to Georgia as a
"transportation route for energy" and a staging base from which
to pursue US interests in the Eurasian region. It refuses to see
the Georgian war as a historically rooted territorial dispute and
continues to encourage Georgia and Ukraine in their bid for eventual
NATO membership.
Presidential candidates Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic
Senator Barack Obama have publicly endorsed the Bush confrontation
with Russia, and neither offers any principled critique of US foreign
policy. In fact, they seem as willing as Bush to take virtually any
action that will keep "Russia bogged down in the Caucasus if it saps
Russia’s capacity to play an effective role on the world stage".
The major European governments, on the other hand, pursue a slightly
saner approach only because they depend on energy supplied by Russia
and are less unified in their foreign and domestic policies. But
they are deeply divided on how to treat Moscow, with only Germany
apparently eager to continue deepening amicable relations.
Ironically, Russia remains for the time being a US "strategic
partner". The United States needs its continued cooperation in
Afghanistan, and in dealing with Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Putin and
Medvedev are not denying the US military the right to ship non-military
supplies though Russian territory to NATO forces in Afghanistan,
though that option is available to them. But they have weakened US
and UN sanctions on Iran, against which the Bush administration is
waging economic and covert war.
Russia also sells weapons to Iran and is completing construction of
Iran’s Bushehr atomic reactor complex. In July, Russia strengthened
oil ties with Iran with a cooperation agreement the giant state
corporation Gazprom signed to develop Iran’s oil and gas fields. It
recently concluded similar deals with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
In short, when it comes to dealing with hostile US-NATO actions in
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and especially in its "near abroad", Russia
has on its side geography as well as many diplomatic options.
America’s future leaders need a new approach to Russia and to the
rest of the world. As they consider how to rebuild at home and
regain trust abroad, they should work with Moscow on all aspects
of their relationship. The next president should strive to build a
new global security system and to move in the direction of nuclear
disarmament. This will require, however, the repudiation of all past
US national security strategies, predicated on the idea that America
has a god-given duty to police the world and meddle in the affairs
of other nations.
Herbert Bix, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the author of
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins), which won
the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at Binghamton University, New York,
and writes on issues of war and empire.