The other major problem that Georgians have with President Saakishvili is that he has acted dictatorially, shutting down the press for disagreeing with him, running roughshod over people because he lays claim to being America’s pick, and there has been a series of suspicious deaths as well. Who is responsible for those deaths is debatable, but they were politicians who criticized him, such as Zviad Zhvania. It is not as if the Georgian people are unused to those in office killing people. A fair number of people died in extremely suspicious circumstances during Shevardnadze’s administration, from the interior minister who somehow fired two bullets into his brain, and according to one report bullets of two different calibers, to the rain of gentlemen descending to the sidewalk from one particular window of the tax administration. The Georgians did, however, expect that the body count would be a little lower with an American pick, and not get off to a fast start.
Another issue among some Georgians is that the US state department, in its infinite wisdom, instructed Saakishvili that he had to stop the arms flow to Chechnya, which I think was most likely a misguided attempt by the White House to gain favor with the Kremlin. Saakishvili, being a novice at the game of running the affairs of a pauper nation and dealing with the US bureaucracy, did as he was told. Unlike Eduard Shevardnadze, who knew the gamesmen of the Kremlin from having been one of them, Saakishvili had little to no idea what he was doing. For his faults, Eduard is nobody’s fool. The outcome of closing off the weapons pipeline was predictable and swift. Chechnya was rapidly subdued, and the Russian army turned to other matters.
September 1, 2004 a school of children were taken hostage in Beslan. Over the next days the entire world watched and in the end 334 were dead, and (probably) all of the hostage takers. And that is why the world heard not a whisper of the battle for Tksinvali in South Ossetia between Russian and Georgian armed forces in 2004. I knew about it because I was running an office there and knew rather well a Georgian officer who fought in the battles. We discussed the negotiations for exchange of POWs afterwards. It was full on Clausewitzian warfare with tanks. But people should understand that such lack of reporting is not that unusual.
Perhaps the Kremlin got the idea for use of Beslan as a media distraction for cover during the Kosovo war. Few people outside the military know that 20,000+ casualties occurred in a single day’s battle between Eritrea and Ethiopia. This is one of the greatest land battles in the history of the world, and barely a whisper reached the Western public, which is the media equivalent of a tree falling with nobody to hear it. So it was that the occupation of Tskinvali took Russia’s forces within miles of the pipeline and cured the problem of South Ossetian ethnics becoming at ease with Georgian ethnics. And now it is impossible to tell where real South Ossetian concerns end and manufactured words from a Kremlin stooge begin.
With the Russian army occupying down to Tskinvali, it's about 30 miles to the Armenian sector, and the pipeline is in between, through terrain much like the Napa region north of San Francisco, but less developed. (i.e. excellent for guerillas.) So it is that the Kremlin came closer to its goal. And just like Russia did in Abkhazia, it gave all the residents of South Ossetia Russian passports, thus creating a pretext for protecting them.
Thus was the stage set for the current attack by Georgian forces. Preceding this Georgian-Russia conflict were guerilla attacks on the pipeline both local and from the PKK. Perhaps the former were done through an Ossetian proxy, perhaps it was a spetznatz (special forces) team. On the map it is pretty obvious why Russia would choose to push down through South Ossetia to get at the pipeline. Doing so practically cuts the nation in half and gives them easy access. In fall of 2004 after Beslan and the occupation of Tskinvali I drew him the map here to show a Georgian officer. I told him then that within a couple of years Georgia should expect guerilla attacks on the pipeline because establishing an insurgency was the obvious next step. It was surprising to me that it took as long as it did, perhaps a testament to the unwillingness of the South Ossetians to get involved. I will note that while the PKK, which conducted the major attack is not an immediately obvious Kremlin ally, it is a logical one to use as a proxy against the pipeline. The PKK has been a very inexpensive proxy to harry the Istanbul government since the cold war, and we should remember that Russian influence in Iraq was very strong.
So, Georgian armed forces attacked Russian lines, assuming that since Georgia had supplied troops for Iraq, and the USA and EU had interests in the pipeline, we would have to help. From this small nation of 3.5 million people, the 2,000 troops supplied to Iraq were equivalent to the USA supplying 170,000 troops to fight a war we had no interests in. Putin took a reading of GW Bush in Peking on the first night of the Olympics, realized he would do nothing to jeopardize Republican chances at winning this election by being tagged again as a warmonger, and is pressing his advantage. I am a little surprised Putin has not pressed it even further, simply occupying the entire nation and surrounding Tbilisi.
Unknown to me now are precisely what internal reasons may have pressed Saakishvili to attack Tskinvali’s Russian forces, since I no longer have any lines into the Georgian government. It is likely Saakishvili may have done it in an attempt to hang on to power in a classic maneuver. As long as Georgians have the impression that Saakishvili is “America’s stooge” he is equipped to maintain himself up as a virtual dictator and keep the flow of pretty ladies falling into his bed the way he likes it. I think it is also likely that Saakishvili was forced by internal politics into this attack because when the oil doesn’t flow, money doesn’t roll into the Georgian treasury. But there are other factors to question.
What this lobbyist, Randy Scheunemann, may have told the Georgians in return for their money is a big question mark in my mind. It is completely plausible that Mr. Scheunemann was playing games with the Georgians, fleecing them as Abramoff did the Indian tribes for their paltry $200,000 a year. That could explain a great deal, because Georgian political culture is all about the back channel. To them, the back door power broker is far more believable than the statements of officials. This is normal in countries where the rule of law has rarely existed. But a larger question mark is how unlikely it is this conflict would just happen to occur at the start of one of the only times in the last 8 years when Putin could get long periods of apparently accidental face time with George Bush, and be free to leave at any moment without generating questions? How likely is it that the balloon would have gone up on the first day of the Olympics, a huge media distraction, to draw the attention of the world away as much as possible? It remains to be seen if the Russian occupation withdraws at the same time as the Olympics are over, but if Russia does follow that timetable, I would consider that extremely interesting. The timing of the start of hostilities suggests an inside job within Saakishvili’s administration as part of the mix. That the Kremlin would have agents inside Georgia should be expected. That Saakishvili, who is not the sharpest tool in the shed, might be prey to such is unsurprising also.
The bottom line here is that however it came about; our conduct will drive the small nations around Russia into the Russian sphere out of fear, or at least give them pause, regardless of the public face. It will drive somewhat larger ones to militarize their relationship with Russia, calling for very serious weaponry on their soil. Shaking our finger and doing nothing has played into the Kremlin’s hands. The more we show our reluctance, bowing to the current “conventional wisdom” of non-intervention, the greater the demonstration for the Kremlin. Putin wants this to happen so that he can regain control of the eastern bloc as well as regain control of Central Asia. Putin aims, at a stroke, to vault the Russian Federation into the status of the USSR. He is going for that triple-play win here, and we are handing him at least 2 of the three on a platter.
We had better think very carefully. Bush blinked in Beijing during the opening ceremony when he did not fly air cover over Georgia. Throwing Georgia to the wolves will have profound effects on our credibility. The USA is not in a position to be able to punish Russia diplomatically because Russia owns the EU’s votes, (unless Russia scares the daylights out of Europe.) If we sanction them unilaterally, Russia is in a position to break most ties with the USA since those are economically insignificant on both sides. Doing either one will be totally unproductive and will give us less leverage than we now have. Additionally, there are multiple proxies Russia can activate to cause problems, and they are, as Christopher Andrew said, simply better at intelligence operations.
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