[Peace-discuss] The Georgia conflict

[Brussel Morton K.]

View of Le Monde Diplomatique  --mkb


Russia gets its act together

September 03, 2008 By Serge Halimi
Source: Le Monde diplomatique

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The question of responsibility for the hostilities in the Caucasus  
shouldn't worry us too much. Less than a week after Georgia's  
invasion, two well-known French commentators said it was old stuff.  
An influential neo-conservative from the United States backed that  
view: knowing who started things "is not very important", wrote  
Robert Kagan. "This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by  
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has  
been attempting to provoke for some time" (1).



One hypothesis deserves another. If, on the day of the opening  
ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, somebody else than Saakashvili, a  
graduate of New York's Columbia Law School, had started a war, would  
western capitals and their media have been able to contain righteous  
indignation at such a symbolic act?



History is easier to follow when goodies and baddies are decided in  
advance. The goodies, such as Georgia, have the right to defend their  
territorial integrity against the separatist struggles of their  
neighbours. The baddies, such as Serbia, must accept the self- 
determination of minority communities or expect to be bombed by Nato.  
The moral of this story is even more enlightening when, to defend his  
country's borders, the charming pro-American Saakashvili repatriates  
some of the 2,000 soldiers he had sent to invade Iraq.



On 16 August President George Bush, speaking with gravity, rightly  
invoked the "Security Council resolutions of the United Nations"  
including the "sovereignty and independence and territorial  
integrity" of Georgia whose "borders should command the same respect  
as every other nation's".



Only the US has the right to act unilaterally when it decides (or  
claims) that its security is at stake. In reality, events have  
followed a simpler plan: the US plays for Georgia against Russia;  
Russia plays for South Ossetia and Abkhazia to "punish" Georgia.



Two Pentagon position papers have indicated a desire to prevent the  
resurgence of Russian power ever since 1992, when it was in ruins. To  
ensure that US hegemony, which began with the first Gulf war and the  
disintegration of the Soviet bloc, became permanent, the Pentagon  
announced that it would be necessary to "convince likely rivals that  
they no longer need aspire to a greater role". If that didn't work,  
the US would know how "to dissuade" them. And the main target was  
Russia, "the only power in the world which could destroy the US".



So can we chide Russian leaders for bristling against western help  
for the "colour revolutions" of Ukraine and Georgia, the inclusion of  
former members of the Warsaw Pact in Nato and the prospect of US  
missiles on Polish soil - all of which were elements of the old US  
strategy to weaken Russia, whatever its regime or its politics?  
"Russia has become a great power, that's what's so worrying,"  
admitted Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister (2).



Zbigniew Brzezinski, the architect of the US' risky strategy in  
Afghanistan, recently explained the other part of the US grand  
design: "We have access through Georgia... to the oil and soon also  
the gas that lies not only in Azerbaijan but beyond it in the Caspian  
sea and beyond in Central Asia. So, in that sense, it's a very major  
and strategic asset to us" (3). He can't be accused of inconsistency:  
even in the days of Boris Yeltsin, when Russia was still floundering,  
he advocated driving it from the Caucasus and Central Asia so that  
energy flows to the West could be guaranteed (4).



Nowadays Russia is doing better, the US is doing less well and oil  
prices have taken off. Victim of its president's provocative actions,  
Georgia has just been hit from three directions.



________________________________________________________



(1) Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, Libération, 14 August  
2008, and Robert Kagan, Washington Post, 11 August 2008.



(2) Interview in the Journal de Dimanche, Paris, 17 August 2008.



(3) Bloomberg News, 12 August 2008.



(4) Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, Basic Books, New York,  
1997.







Translated by Robert Waterhouse
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