Informed Speculation

I must be away from the computer until this evening, so I just wanted to put up a quick post saying that it is possible that Russia is ending its Georgian aggression, which would be an undeniably good thing…but there are also reports that the attacks continue.  I’m sure the story will continue to unfold…but for the first time in 5 days, there is at least a glimmer of hope.

UPDATE 8:38 p.m.: So the immediate crisis appears to have thankfully passed.  The terms of a ceasefire are in place, and something more permanent will probably be worked out over the next couple of days.  Of course, the fact that Russians remain the peacekeepers, instead of an international force, means that the situation will continue to be farcically lopsided, and I have not the slightest whit of confidence that Russia will keep its pledge to respect the territorial integrity of Georgia…but kudos to the French for at least getting this far (though no doubt international pressure, and the fact that Russia kept fighting long enough to seriously degrade Georgia’s military capabilities, also contributed to Russia’s pullback).

I’ll get back to politics now, barring some very bad turn of events (I’m itching to get to those Clinton campaign e-mails!), but first let’s recap two big lessons we have learned here.

(1) We should have learned this lesson after encouraging the uprising against Saddam after the first Gulf War, but apparently we forgot it.  The lesson is this: if you are going to encourage small forces to act against larger ones that can easily overpower them, you HAVE to be ready to back them up.  Encouraging Georgia to stand up for its freedom is one thing; encouraging it to act militarily against the third-largest military in the world is quite another.   Only time will tell what sort of assurances, if any, were given to Georgia prior to the decision to make a move against the separatists…but we’ve got to be extremely careful not to contribute to doomed delusions of grandeur.  None of this is to excuse Russia, which brings us to…

(2)  Putin’s Russia has been unmasked to even the most blinkered of observers.  It has been abundantly clear for quite some time that Russia under Putin is returning to the autocratic state that has so often characterized it (Stalin once said, in arguing for a successor to Lenin as the supreme Bolshevik figure, that Russia needs a strong man at the top – after all, it is the land of the tsar).  As long as the tendency was confined internally, it was not a cause of much concern, though it was (and is) dispiriting in the extreme.

But we now see that clearly Russia intends to reassert its dominance over the old Soviet states, to the greatest extent possible, and that it will be especially hostile to pro-Western, democratic states on its borders.  It’s hard to overstate how much ill will this move has generated. Putin will be looked on with great suspicion henceforth, and unlike America, there’s no imminent change of captains to get things off to a fresh start.

Briefly, then, lesson #2 is: the bear, after a brief hibernation, is no longer groggy – he is now fully awake, and he’s hungry…

UPDATE 9:11 p.m.: However, regarding lesson #1, let it be noted that the NY Times is reporting that America had explicitly warned Georgia, as recently as days before the crisis, that it should not get into a military confrontation with Russia…though the Times also suggests that previous steps to build up Georgia’s confidence may have caused the warning to be received with less than the seriousness it deserved:

One month ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia, for a high-profile visit that was planned to accomplish two very different goals.

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. “I’m going to visit a friend and I don’t expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend,” she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.

In the five days since the simmering conflict between Russia and Georgia erupted into war, Bush administration officials have been adamant in asserting that they warned the government in Tbilisi not to let Moscow provoke it into a fight — and that they were surprised when their advice went unheeded. Right up until the hours before Georgia launched its attack late last week in South Ossetia, Washington’s top envoy for the region, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, and other administration officials were warning the Georgians not to allow the conflict to escalate.

But as Ms. Rice’s two-pronged visit to Tbilisi demonstrates, the accumulation of years of mixed messages may have made the American warnings fall on deaf ears.

The United States took a series of steps that emboldened Georgia: sending advisers to build up the Georgian military, including an exercise last month with more than 1,000 American troops; pressing hard to bring Georgia into the NATO orbit; championing Georgia’s fledgling democracy along Russia’s southern border; and loudly proclaiming its support for Georgia’s territorial integrity in the battle with Russia over Georgia’s separatist enclaves.

But interviews with officials at the State Department, Pentagon and the White House show that the Bush administration was never going to back Georgia militarily in a fight with Russia.

In recent years, the United States has also taken a series of steps that have alienated Russia — including recognizing an independent Kosovo and going ahead with efforts to construct a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. By last Thursday, when the years of simmering conflict exploded into war, Russia had a point to prove to the world, even some administration officials acknowledge, while Georgia may have been under the mistaken impression that in a one-on-one fight with Russia, Georgia would have more concrete American support.

UPDATE 10:38 p.m.: I’m often quite critical of the NY Times, but they’ve been very solid on this story (their reporting is generally solid – their editorial board is far too squishy for my tastes).  Here’s an update:

Whether the agreement holds or not, Russia has achieved its goals, effectively creating a new reality on the ground, humiliating the Georgian military and increasing the pressure on a longtime antagonist, Mr. Saakashvili.

Russian authorities make no secret of their desire to see Mr. Saakashvili prosecuted on war crimes in The Hague, and could well try other measures to undermine him. Mr. Medvedev also authorized Russian soldiers to fire on “hotbeds of resistance and other aggressive actions.” As the conflict cools and hardens, the two separatist regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, could wind up permanently annexed by Russia.

But in signing on to an accord, Russia appears to have stopped short of a full-scale invasion that would have set off a broader cold-war-style confrontation with the West. Its actions have already aroused widespread alarm about Russia’s redrawing of the geopolitical map, and some fear that they could undermine democratic gains in a region that was once part of the Soviet sphere. But Mr. Saakashvili’s military attack on the South Ossetians has also drawn criticism as needlessly provocative.

That’s a pretty accurate assessment…