Gwynne Dyer: Georgia's huge South Ossetia mistake

[GliderGuider]

I've always had enormous respect for Dyer as a geopolitical/military analyst.

Gwynne Dyer: Georgia's huge South Ossetia mistake

The war in South Ossetia is essentially over, and the Georgians have lost. This was Georgia’s second attempt in 18 years to conquer the breakaway territory by force, and now that option is gone for good. So are the country’s hopes of joining NATO. Yet sections of the western media are carrying on as if the Russians started it and are now threatening to invade Georgia itself.

U.S. President George W. Bush has condemned Russia’s “disproportionate and dangerous” response. Much is made of Russian air attacks on targets inside Georgia, and especially of the inevitable misses that cause civilian casualties, but the vast majority of the 2,000 civilians allegedly killed so far in this conflict were South Ossetians killed by Georgian shells, rockets, and bombs. Some shooting and bombing will continue until all the Georgian troops are cleared out of South Ossetia—including the 40 percent they controlled before the war—but then it will stop.

The offensive was obviously planned well in advance, but Saakashvili didn’t think it through. He knew that the world’s attention would be distracted by the Olympics, and he hoped that Russia’s reaction would be slow because Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was off in Beijing. Given three or four days to establish full military control of South Ossetia, he could put a pro-Georgian administration in place and declare the problem solved. But his calculations were wrong.

The Bush administration’s bizarre ambition to extend NATO into the Caucasus mountains is dead. Russians are pleased with the speed and effectiveness of their government’s response. And nobody else really cares.

There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn’t strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend. There is no great strategic issue either: apart from a few pipeline routes, the whole Transcaucasus is of little importance to the rest of the world. A year from now, the Georgians will probably have dumped Saakashvili, and the rest of us may not even remember his foolish adventure.

More at the link.

[OregonBlue]

1. Good summation. K & R.

[Turbineguy]

2. I think it goes a bit deeper than that

but I need to do more research.

On edit: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=376716&mesg_id=376731

[al bupp]

3. I think one word sums it up

Hubris. Saakashvili over-estimated almost everything he had going for him, primarily the alliance w/ the US, and greatly under-estimated the likely Russian response. I'm tempted to think he was suckered in by those cagey Ruskies.

Otherwise, I largely agree w/ the analysis you posted, though the pipeline questions may have longer and larger implications than it supposes.

[GliderGuider]

5. Yes, I agree that the BTC pipeline is a major wild card.

This helps consolidate Russia's stranglehold on Europe's energy supplies. That makes me very nervous.

[al bupp]

6. I think the Russians may simply be cornering the market

Having thoroughly renounced communism, and now practicing capitalism (albeit, state-sponsored) w/ a vengeance, it seems to me that the Russians may not have anything more fiendish in mind that making a lot of money by owning the primary conduits to Europe and Israel. I'm not sure it's a cause for a worry the same as it would have been during the Cold War. We may just be witnessing the resurgence of the Russian Empire. That's we in the west get for our foolish adventure in Iraq, and it pretty much serves us right I'd say.

[eridani]

19. The new version seems as ass-backwards an empire as the old version

Your typical empire forces the periphery to sell the center cheap commodities or low-tech products, and then sells them more expensive manufactured products. If I could find a graph of the flow of oil and natural gas to East Germany and the reverse flow of sophisticated Zeiss cameras the other way, I'd head straigh over to www.icanhascheezburger.com and caption it

IMPERIALIZM

U R DOIN IT WRONG!

[yardwork]

7. I remember when Saddam Hussein was supposedly guilty of similar hubris

when he "annexed" Kuwait. Both incidents have something telling in common - a Bush administration representative had recently met with the leader of the country who suddenly did a really stupid thing.

Coincidence?

[al bupp]

10. The question would then be...

To what nefarious purpose would the Georgian annexation serve the BFEE? I tend to think it was Russia doing the suckering, since they have so much to gain, and yes, the recent meeting w/ a Bush admin rep was, in fact, just a coincidence.

[DailyGrind51]

4. The most salient sentence in a great analysis:

"What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya" A "break-away republic" is a "break-away republic", no matter whom it attempts to break away from.

[dtotire]

8. Good Analysis From Salon

Aug. 14, 2008 | The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow's actions -- with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration's condemnations of Russia ring hollow.
Bush said on Monday, responding to reports that Russia might attack the Georgian capital, "It now appears that an effort may be under way to depose duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century." By Wednesday, with more Russian troops on the move and a negotiated cease-fire quickly unraveling, Bush stepped up the rhetoric, announcing a sizable humanitarian-aid mission to Georgia and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region.

Whether the United States was actively involved in the attempted coup in 2002 against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, or merely cheered it on, it is clear that Venezuelan popular sovereignty meant nothing to Bush if it resulted in a government unfriendly to and critical of Washington.

An even more egregious example came with the destabilization and overthrow of the Hamas government, which won control of the Palestine Authority in January 2006. Bush insisted on allowing the participation in elections of Hamas, a fundamentalist party with a covert paramilitary that has struck at Israeli targets, including civilians. When the party unexpectedly won, however, Bush refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government, denying it funds and sympathizing with the Israeli attempt to overthrow it. Israeli security forces kidnapped elected Hamas representatives and cabinet ministers, and harmed civilians by blocking medical aid and food that might go to people via the Hamas government.
In 2007, Bush and the Israelis supported a takeover in the West Bank by forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization, lead by Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Similar attempts were made in Gaza, but they failed, leaving the elected Hamas government in charge of the small territory. Palestinian popular sovereignty, and Hamas' victory in what were widely judged to have been relatively free and fair elections, were disregarded by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Bush.

Bush and Cheney also repeatedly sided with military dictator Pervez Musharraf against elected civilian politicians in Pakistan. Even when the Pakistani Parliament, elected in open polls last February, initiated impeachment proceedings against Musharraf earlier this week, the Bush administration came out against the idea of Musharraf's going into exile if convicted, urging that he be allowed to stay "honorably" in Pakistan if he stepped down.
Bush's exceptionalism, whereby he implicitly maintained that no international laws or institutions would be allowed to constrain U.S. actions taken in the name of national security, grew out of the sole superpower status of the United States after fall of the Soviet Union. A unipolar world is, however, an exceedingly rare circumstance in modern world history, and it was unlikely to last very long. China may soon have the economic and technological clout to go toe to toe with the United States; and Russia, fueled by the energy boom, is recovering from its economic disaster of the 1990s.

The collapse of the Soviet economy produced tremendous misery and downward mobility. Uncertainty made couples unwilling to risk having children. In one of the great demographic reversals in history, the Russian Federation's population fell by 10 million in the years after 1991. Russian need for U.S. foreign aid and goodwill led Moscow to acquiesce for a time in the expansion of U.S. influence into Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Russia is now reemerging and flexing its muscles. The run-up in the price of oil and gas has filled Moscow's coffers, since it is one of the great producers of natural gas in the world (prices of natural gas tend to track with those of petroleum). Russia has reasserted its influence in countries such as Uzbekistan, which had briefly licensed a base to U.S. forces but then kicked them out, and in Turkmenistan, which recently agreed to pipe its natural gas through Moscow. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin are increasingly acting like Gulf emirs, flush with petrodollars and assured of political leverage because of their control over energy resources.

In a unipolar world, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war allowed Washington to assert itself without fear of contradiction. The Bush doctrine, however, was never meant to be emulated by others and was therefore implicitly predicated on the notion that all challengers would be weaker than the United States throughout the 21st century. Bush and Cheney are now getting a glimpse of a multipolar world in which other powers can adopt their modus operandi with impunity. Bush's rhetoric may have sounded like that of President Woodrow Wilson, but his policy has often been to support the overthrow or hobbling of elected governments that he does not like -- and that has not gone unnoticed by countries that also count themselves great powers and would not mind following suit.

The problem with international law for a superpower is that it is a constraint on overweening ambition. Its virtue is that it constrains the aggressive ambitions of others. Bush gutted it because he thought the United States would not need it anytime soon. But Russia is now demonstrating that the Bush doctrine can just as easily be the Putin doctrine. And that leaves America less secure in a world of vigilante powers that spout rhetoric about high ideals to justify their unchecked military interventions. It is the world that Bush has helped build.

[DailyGrind51]

11. Thank you very much for this!

The panic-peddlers on "the Right" would never bother with this in-depth analysis, preferring to resort to sloganeering and "bumper-sticker" logic.

[Blue_Tires]

15. brilliant...thanks

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

9. "He knew that the world’s attention would be distracted by the Olympics, and he hoped that

Russia’s reaction would be slow because Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was off in Beijing."


He obviously was not counting on Vladimir Putin's cunning use of "the cell phone".

[LSK]

12. K&R - one of the best writeups of the situation I have seen so far

[Supersedeas]

13. disproportionate response?? We invade Iraq pre-emptively with NO proportion.

[GliderGuider]

14. It takes one to know one, isn't that the saying? n/t

[Strelnikov_]

16. KnR n/t

[Spazito]

17. I, too, greatly respect Gwynne Dyer and find his articles to be MUST READS...

if one wants to find out the facts over the propaganda.

Thanks for posting this.

Recommended.

[DemReadingDU]

18. and another viewpoint

8/12/08 The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power by George Friedman

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

4-page article...
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/russo_georgian_war_and_balance_power

My spouse was talking to me about the reasoning for this invasion this morning similar to this article which I discovered this afternoon.