A second look at the three-day war

A Georgian diplomat blurted out inconveniently last Tuesday that it was his own country that started the August war with Russia, which it then lost ignominiously.

Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Tbilisi’s former ambassador to Moscow, not only blamed his own country for the fighting, he also said Georgia had received a green light from the U.S. to go ahead with it.

This bombshell buttresses speculation elsewhere that Condoleeza Rice’s visit to that country just before the debacle included prodding Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to pursue the harebrained scheme to recover the territories of South Ossetia and eventually Abkhazia.

Tony Wood mused in the Sept 11 London Review of Books that Rice might have egged Saakashvili on during her visit of July 9-10. The Georgian president miscalculated that the Russians wouldn’t intervene militarily or perhaps thought the U.S. would come to his aid if they did. Wrong on both counts.

So why would Rice/Cheney/Bush encourage such a foolhardy move? Wood reasons that the U.S. gained plenty from the incident: quick agreement from Poland on a long-delayed plan to site missiles there with which to threaten the Russians, possibly a long-term U.S. military presence in Georgia, a cranked-up cold war and not incidentally a shot in the arm to the faltering McCain campaign, whose foreign policy adviser Randy Schuenemann worked for the Georgians until May 2008. All without a single U.S. casualty and full deniability.

The whole sorry episode is reminiscent of another war the United States encouraged and then lived to regret: Brzezinski’s chortling glee over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. There’s plenty on the record about the Carter Administration’s game in luring the Soviet dinosaur into those tar pits, which weakened the enemy and also brought us Osama bin Laden and his merry band. I wonder what the successful provocation of ethnic warfare in the Caucasus will mean for us ten or twenty years down the road.