I will not pretend to know any more about the Caucasus than the next man you may happen to meet on the streets of Dublin. However, in following the events of recent days, there has been one thing that has surprised me above all else.
I am referring to the readiness of commentators to casually dismiss the decision of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to order his troops into the city of Tshkinvali as being ” criminally insane”, “foolish”, “naive”, “a reckless gamble”, “a monumental misreading of the situation”, and such like.
Maybe the decision was all of these things. However, two things are not sitting right with me at present regarding this point-of-view.
Truth or Truism?
Firstly, it does seem a rather trite explanation of the affair, especially when you compare it to the complex and tangled events that have occurred in the region. There has been any number of skirmishes, political wars of words, and diplomatic maneuvers between Georgia and Russia in recent years.
Secondly, no one appears to really be asking why he made such a decision. It seems enough to dismiss the man as a fool, offer some wafer thin explanations, and leave it at that. That seems a strange thing for intelligent people to do.
Questions Piqued by Quriousity
Therefore, I have some questions that I would genuinely appreciate responses to.
(1) Why would Saakashvili make such a blatant hostile move when confronted by an opponent the size of the Russian military, when to do so meant losing the moral high ground that he would have enjoyed in the West beforehand?
(2) Some have said that Saakashvili takes “reckless chances”. Maybe he has done so in his career to date, but we are talking about the possible ruination of his country here. Is he really that reckless? If he has been so reckless in his actions, might there even be a case for why he should be joining Radovan Karadzic in The Hague for a crime against peace?
(3) There has been the argument that he did not expect the Russians to respond so quickly. Are we really saying that he misread Vladimir Putin, of all people, that badly?
(4) Similarly, did Saakashvili just happen to forget about the presence of a huge Russian military airbase at Mozdok in North Ossetia - the hub of Russian military operations against Checnya and the same one from which an enormous Russian military exercise was conducted last month? The soldiers and pilots stationned there are battle-hardened and combat-ready men. His best 2,000 soldiers were still in Iraq.
(5) Others have said that he wanted Russia to react in this manner in the naive expectation that his Western allies would suddenly come rushing to his defence. My question here is a simple one - them and whose army? These same allies who are hugely stretched right now from years of continued conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq? The same ones who would also readily decide that now was the right time to go and pick a fight with Russia, a fellow permanent member of the UN Securtiy Council? I am really struggling with this one.
(6) Some have said that Saakashvili expected Western intervention to be more on a political level and that Russia would back down in the face of such pressure. All I want to know here is should I laugh now or should I laugh later? Surely no one can be that naive!
(7) My final question, facetiously, is should the Columbia Law School consider cutting its fees seeing as it thought this apparently insane fool worthy of a masters of law degree?
Bear Baiting
As you can see, I am somewhat perplexed by the reporting of recent days. On the one hand, I have little doubt that when it comes to brinksmanship that Saakashvili is no John F. Kennedy and that South Ossetia is no Cuba. To some extent, he has to be accountable for what has just taken place. Certainly, he has never seemed to shy away from baiting the Russian bear. However, even so, are we really to believe that, acting alone, Saakashvili has been this hopelessly rash? Or might it just be that there are other aspects to this story that have yet to surface? I wonder.
As I said earlier, thoughts that look to go beyond the veneer of reporting to date would be hugely appreciated!
Filed under: Politics | Tagged: Caucasus, Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, North Ossetia, Russia, South Ossetia, Vladimir Putin
I’ve noticed that reports in the Irish Times (mostly those by Lara Marlowe, I think) have repeatedly referred to either Georgia starting the conflict or rising to Russian bait. BBC World says on their web page on the region “Following nearly a week of clashes between Georgian troops and separatist forces in early August 2008, Georgia on 7 August launched an aerial bombardment and ground attack on South Ossetia “; Saakashvili told a BBC reporter live on air last night that Georgian forces responded “ten minutes” after “150 Russian tanks” passed through the tunnel into South Ossetia.
You make a good list of reasons why Saakashvili could hardly hope for a positive outcome, but I’d say it was a combination of having his hand forced (by separatist activity), misunderestimating his own forces (his crack troops are US-trained, remember) and misunderestimating the Russian response. I think the last part is the most important, because the one thing I take away from the reports is the Russian power trip and their insistence on equating this with the independence of Kosovo. That’s the driving force behind this event.
But whatever misunderestimations he may have made, it’s hard to know how much they contibuted to his decision without knowing for sure who started the fight.
Thanks Gabba. I agree that tensions had been rising in the immediate run-up to troops going into South Ossetia.
Moreover, I do appreciate that his troops have had military training with the US Army. However, they were up against the might of the forces kept at the Mozdok military base. It was never ever going to be an even fight.
The NY Times has also been running with a story regarding a heavy spate of cyber attacks launched from within Russia on Georgian websites over the week prior to all-out hostilities breaking out.
In all, I agree twith you entirely that to take up the narrative towards the end of a long sequence of events and draw conclusions from that point forward strikes me as very poor analysis.
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My problem with the argument that Saakashvili underestimated the Russian response is outlined above.
To throw a few more things into the mix though, we saw what happened in Chechnya, Britain accuse Putin’s government of carrying out an assassination on their soil, neighbouring countries have literally been frozen into acquiescence over gas price disputes, and Putin’s armies have been playing silly buggers on the Georgian border in recent weeks.
What sort of person could dare underestimate what a man like Putin is capable of?
I am still a long way short of being convinced that underestimating the Russian response is the key to the whole affair. As you say, the full story has yet to emerge.