This month, the EU will issue a report about the causes of the recent conflict in Georgia. Last Thursday, the New York Times published an article on the subject (p A14)(see excerpts below). There is some worry that, depending on the contents, the report may actually cause problems on the ground in Georgia.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said that Georgia was too small to prevail in a war with Russia and added that they (the Georgians) are not crazy.
It is certainly good to know that Mr. Saakashvili now understands this and that he is not crazy at this time. Unfortunately for him, his current state of mind is irrelevant to the report. It is also too bad that his state of mind and thinking before the conflict are well known and opposite of what they are now.
He spent those months immersed in reading books about the Russo-Finnish War at the beginning of World War II. This war, well known to military history buffs, was one of the most unlikely---even freakish---of all time. Finland---a country with a fair amount of territory that is frozen, uninhabited wasteland and a small population concentrated in its southern region--- for some time held off an attack by much more populous, much larger Russia.
It stunned the world.
But there were reasons for their successes. Finland is a formidably cold place---even by Russian standards. Over the years, their tiny army had developed a variety of special tactics and strategies uniquely suited to their situation.
As tensions mounted in the period of time preceeding the recent conflict, Mr. Saakashvili kept concentrating on---and emphasizing---this rare historical event. It was quite clear he did think he could win---at least long enough to embarass Russia and mobilize international support. And it is also quite obvious from various facts observed on the ground (as detailed in a Wall Street Journal article referenced in this diary at the time) that Georgia was very much to blame for initiating the conflict.
NYT, September 23, 2009
MOSCOW — European Union monitors are stepping up their patrols in Georgia ahead of the release of a much anticipated report on the origins of last year’s war in South Ossetia, in case the report’s conclusions reignite tensions around the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The report could make political waves if it sharply apportions blame, instead of concluding, as many in the West have, that both governments bear some responsibility. Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, in New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly, dismissed a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel that said he would be largely blamed for starting the war.
"Nobody takes this kind of newspaper [sic] quote seriously because everybody who was there — and there were serious people there — everybody knows what happened," Mr. Saakashvili said Tuesday on the CNN program "American Morning." He said Georgia was too small a country to prevail in a war with Russia. "We are not crazy in any way," he said.
A Russian deputy foreign minister, Grigory B. Karasin, said he expected an "honest and unbiased report." He noted that Russian officials met with the commission’s leader for a final round of questioning as recently as last week, making available a major figure: Gen. Maj. Marat Kulakhmetov, who led a detachment of Russian peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia on the night the war broke out. "We seek the truth, and we are convinced the truth is on our side," Mr. Karasin told the Interfax news service during a trip to Astrakhan, in southern Russia.