Page 1 of 2 Lessons from the war in Georgia
By Herbert Bix
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.
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