South Ossetia At Front Of New East-West Conflict?

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South Ossetia At Front Of New East-West Conflict?
by Radio Free Europe


In an effort to prod the West to Tbilisi's side in its rapidly escalating armed conflict with Russia, President Mikheil Saakashvili is invoking the ghosts of Cold War battles past -- Moscow's suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in 1979.

The Georgian leader's strategy is clear. Tbilisi's small army is no match for the Russian military machine. Saakashvili's only chance of success in his bid to regain control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, therefore, is to globalize the conflict and turn it into a central front of a new struggle between Moscow and the West.

"What Russia has been doing against Georgia for the last two days represents an open aggression, unprecedented in modern times," Saakashvili said in a televised address on August 8. "It is a direct challenge for the whole world. If Russia is not stopped today by the whole world, tomorrow Russian tanks might reach any European capital. I think everyone has understood this by now."

So far, the West has not taken the bait. The United States and the European Union are sending envoys to Georgia to try to broker a cease-fire and Western leaders have issued predictable statements calling on both sides to show restraint.

Most European leaders, wary of antagonizing Moscow, have strived to come across as more or less balanced in the conflict. And even Georgia's closest ally in the West, the United States, has thus far offered little more than rhetorical support...cont'd

http://www.rferl.org/content/Article/1189793.html