Thoughts on Georgia

I have not had a lot of time to post lately but I need to get some thoughts out there regarding the conflict between Georgia and Russia.

I'm not going to go overboard with the "age-old intractable conflict" stuff but what we are seeing is yet another harvesting of the bitter fruit planted with such care by Stalin and cultivated ever since by his Soviet and Russian successors. Stalin's great contribution to an already fractious multiethnic environment was to overlay it with administrative boundaries that cut through ethnic regions such as Abkhazia and Ossetia, dividing them between (in this case) Georgia and Russia. A similar cartographic stunt led to - surprise! - similar catastrophe in the ethnically Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, but you can bet that we will be hearing yet another variant of the "No one could have imagined" line from noted regional expert and occasional Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I am also not going to follow the official line of "brave tiny democracy against unthinking brutal autocracy." Georgia has made strides in its governance since the disaster of civil conflict in the 1990s and the Shevardnadze kleptocracy, but the Georgian reputation for corruption did not spring out of the ground unbidden; like most roots of this and other crises in the region, it easily predates even the Soviet period (which, it must be remembered, didn't quite make it to 75 before succumbing) so its Rose Revolution is not necessarily the sweetest-smelling flower out there. Furthermore, President Saakashvili and his administration clearly miscalculated just about every single aspect of this operation, from the PR bonanza of rocketing civilians on the opening day of the Olympics, to the subsequent Russian response, and to the response of the West and particularly the United States. On this last subject, there has been a lot of speculation on how much encouragement or restraint we applied to Tbilisi. We won't know details on this for a while, perhaps, but my guess is that the Georgians received a variety of incoherencies from multiple incompetents, and translated them into what they wanted to hear anyway. (Summary: everyone screwed up.)

Russia, on the other hand, is in fact a brutal autocracy (albeit in much better-tailored suits and shoes these days) but it is not unthinking and it clearly did a LOT of thinking in the years leading up to last week. I suspect there was not a lot of dust to blow off of the contingency plan for this one, as evidenced by the rapid and substantial Russian counterattack. From my reading of various reports it is also clear that the Russians more or less told the Georgians that this is what would happen, and had been telling them this for years. In sterile textbook terms, the Russians acted and reacted rationally.

Did Russia overreact? From an outraged general Western perspective and specifically from someone who fell in love with Georgia on a visit 20 years ago and has watched any number of tragedies befall it since, the answer is yes and I will join my colleagues in the streets. However, from a Russian perspective which may consider the breakup of the USSR as not necessarily irretrievable, and in the absence of anyone being willing, able or even caring enough to intervene, the chance to slam an erstwhile US ally and a country that annoyed even while in the USSR and before that the Russian Empire (and triply so since 1991), and in response to that country's own aggression against a proxy (and South Ossetia is Georgian territory only on maps, not in reality) is one that you can almost hardly blame the Russians for taking advantage of. Honestly, what were we going to do, deploy US forces into the region? We wouldn't have done that regardless of current force commitments and the Russians know it.

Hey, and while we're at it, let's stick to Lermontov and early Tolstoi if we're discussing the Caucasus, although strictly speaking they were posted to Chechnya and Dagestan. Sadly, that is close enough for our present purposes.

But enough of my bloviating. Let's bring in the pros, or at least people who have more time to write stuff than I do.

Anatol Lieven lays it out very well here (ht Talking Points Memo).

Paul Goble has some thoughts on this here. Goble, some may recall, resigned from his State Department position in 1991 over the first Bush Administration's response to the Soviet crackdown in the Baltic States, especially the massacre of civilians at the Vilnius broadcasting tower. I recall that event quite clearly since Dr. Goble was teaching a Soviet Nationalities course in which I was participating at the time. One January evening he entered class, announced that that evening's session was cancelled as the Soviets had just shot a bunch of civilians in Vilnius, and promptly left to go back to his office at the State Department.

Other good sources of discussion may be found at Obsidian Wings, Belgravia Dispatch, and Lawyers, Guns and Money. For inappropriate historical analogies and Manichean insight, any of the fine sites on JJV's blogroll will do nicely.