A contrary view from TPM Reader VI …
I have to respectfully disagree with you on your post “Beware”. I never thought I would be agreeing on Cheney and McCain, but here I am, as weird as it seems to me.
First of all your comparison with Kosovo is flawed. Sure it is a “vexed” region as you say, but some areas are more vexed than others. In this case, there is really no history of ethnic strife between the breakaway region Ossetia (home of ethnic ossetians) and Georgia. Even now there is a notable absence of any ethnic based violence, as one would expect to see. Pretty much all of the fighting is between Russian military and Georgians. In fact, the only reason this is a breakaway region is because Russia invaded that part of Georgia in early 90’s and setup a puppet regime. The government that runs Ossetia almost entirely consists of former Russian regional governors, former officials of Russia’s ministries, military and FSB. So this is pretty much an artificial ‘breakaway’ situation.Secondly, how far exactly are we willing to go to avoid a conflict with an aggressive government, like Russia? Would we be willing to let Russia trample a real, legitimate democracy (one of so few in the region) and a true U.S. ally, who is not just another sketchy ‘friend of Bush’ (like Pakistan, for example)?
If Russia gets to win this one, they will surely feel encouraged to pursue their other territorial ambitions. They have ambitions toward parts of Ukraine and Moldova. They frequently express desire to protect allegedly oppressed ethnic russians in the Baltic states, as well as Ukraine and other parts of former USSR.
Russia’s foreign policy is a real threat to regional and world stability. This should not be allowed to stand.
Disagreeing is TPM Reader RC …
A few things need to be considered about possible Georgia adventures:
1) When Kosovo declared independence on Feb. 17, 2008, the United States and most European nations rushed to support it, ignoring Russia’s energetic complaints. This support was the logical outgrowth of nearly two decades of Western backing for the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, the West also gave clear support to the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union.
2) Russia has long charged, with apparently some justification, that Georgia gave covert support to the rebels in Chechnya during the 1990s.
3) From most accounts, the South Ossetian and Abkhazian people genuinely support secession from Georgia.
4) The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which traverses Georgia and opened in 2005, was intended expressly as a way to export oil from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to the West while bypassing Russia. A growing share of Israel’s petroleum imports traverses this pipeline – surely one of the reasons why Israel has joined with the United States to train and arm Georgia’s military. Israel is also planning to link this pipeline to Israel’s own Ashelon-Eilat pipeline from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, thus creating an oil export conduit to Asia.
5) Since the 1990s, and accelerating under the Bush administration, Georgia has avidly become an arch-loyal ally of the United States, hosting U.S. military training teams and what is reputed to be a major CIA station. Its 2,000 troops in Iraq (now hastily withdrawn) were a sign of this fealty.
All these factors should give us reason to suspect that U.S. support for Georgia, its tacit opposition to South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, and its pious complaints about Russian conduct are deeply hypocritical. Democracy and self-determination are fine concepts, but in this case they’re mainly being used by Washington as weapons in a latter-day Great Game of oil geopolitics and lingering Cold War attitudes.
