Now that the war in Georgia is cooling down, we in the West have to ask ourselves: Could it have gone better, and if so, how?
We have to step off the anti-Imperialist soapbox a moment and ask what would have happened had the Russians not stepped in.
Moscow has agreed to cease hostilities in Georgia, which means that it’ll stop major offensive action while snatching up the last bits of contested land not under its tank treads, like Abkhazia’s Kodori Gorge. And, as we anticipated, they presented the terms that define their ideal outcome to the conflict:
"Russia’s foreign minister called for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to resign and Medvedev said Georgia must pull its troops from South Ossetia and Abkhazia — the two breakaway provinces at the heart of the dispute."
I would imagine that Russia will budge on the former point, but their actions show they’re not giving ground on the latter - literally, in that they have waited until they physically control all the terrain of the breakaway districts. Russians respect real politik in a way that is decidedly old school - their treaties expect and present control in fact, not just handshakes. It’s clear that they neither trust the Georgian government to make good on their political deals with them, nor the Georgian armed forces to restrain themselves from being a threat. So they have put their trust in forced submission and annihilation of Georgia’s arms.
Why shouldn’t they? Georgia has given them - and any objective observer, particularly the Ossetians - no reason to trust.
For those just tuning in to the Caucasus mountains - the factious Big Brother to the Balkans where tribal conflict is concerned - Georgia has a recent history of mafia oligarchy masked as democracy. In ‘89 to ‘91, Georgia banned Ossetian language, banned Ossetian political opposition, rejected all subsequent attempts for freedom from Georgian control. In ‘91 to ‘92, it was open season in South Ossetia, with Georgian soldiers going from house to house, killing and burning to drive the people out. Then came actual war, humanitarian crisis, only stopped by the resolve of the South Ossetians, Georgia’s internal fragility and Moscow’s intervention.
The new President of Georgia, Saakashvili, was hailed as a break from that corrupt past, but while he has proposed lovely plans of virtual autonomy and cultural advancement, his actions are to only press the Ossetians harder. He tried a US-backed crackdown-cum-invasion in 2004, failed, offered democratic rights, and then undercut them by running intelligence operations to destabilize Ossetia.
And now, he went with total war. Russia has responded in kind, albeit without seeking actual conquest of all of Georgia. The censure on the West has been considerable, almost universal. But I would ask the West, and you, dear reader, what should have been done otherwise?
Russia is criticized for intervening in this "internal conflict." But Darfur is an "internal conflict." Rwandan genocide was an "internal conflict." Saddam’s incursions into Kurdistan, including the gassing of Halabja, were "internal conflicts." And in each of those cases, unless military force was used to intervene, genocide was the result.
Now we have a case where a brutal genocide was beginning - Tskhinvali teems with horror stories. And what happened? Russia did not propose sanctions in the UN to spend months of diplomacy trying to effect an economic change that might shift the democratic political climate in Georgia. Those sanctions would have been shot down by the USA anyway. Russia did not waste "harsh words" condemning Georgia’s genocide, as Bush has done with Darfur, leading to an estimated 400,000 dead and climbing.
Russia stopped it. It stopped the threat, right then and there, and made sure that the perpetrator cannot break trust and try again.
So I ask you, what would have been better?
Had Russia stood by, South Ossetia would likely have been cleansed by Georgia. The policy that eradicates their language and bans them from having local political power would have been cast in the rotting bodies of far more than the 2,000 Russia reports.
And believe me, the USA would have done nothing. The UN would have done nothing. It would have just been another "internal conflict" to make a tear-jerking documentary about and then forget.
Instead, whether we like Russia’s political gain from it or not, we have an example of a nation that tried to commit genocide and lost political, military and economic might because of it. I do not celebrate the suffering of the Georgian people. But I laud the lesson learned by the Georgian government.
For it comes down to this: Would we rather have South Ossetia cleansed of its native people by our ally, than see our enemy be the one to prevent it? And what alternative was there, if genocide was to be stopped?