We Don’t Need Clowns Like Saakashvili in NATO

From the Balkans to the Caucusus there are many scores just waiting to be settled. We saw that when Yugoslavia fell apart leading to massacres in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Then Georgia beset Abkhazia and South Ossetia which eventually led to Saakashvili’s pathetic assault on South Ossetia which inevitably backfired, sending the Georgians reeling for cover.

We don’t need governments led by the likes of Saakashvili in NATO. They’re much too unpredictable and unreliable to be trusted with NATO membership. Saakashvili revealed as much in his remarks today. They show a guy who is out of touch with reality and who thought he could bring the weight of the West into his showdown with Moscow. From the New York Times:

“President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, who has appeared repeatedly on Western television during the days of conflict with Russia, made frantic and apparently overstated warnings on Wednesday that Russian troops were poised to enter the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

In an interview on CNN, the Georgian president said the Russians “are closing on the capital, circling,” with the intention of establishing their own government.

…he also blamed the West for not intervening more forcefully, nearly a week after hostilities broke out between Georgia and its much larger neighbor.

“Frankly, my people feel let down by the West,” he said.

As for how he planned to halt the formidable Russian forces if they indeed headed toward Tbilisi, he said, “This will not be only Georgian troops” but an “all-out defense.”

Asked if the White House was doing enough, he said: “I just spoke to President Bush. Frankly, some of the first statements were seen as a green light for Russia. They were kind of soft.”

He said the United State should be doing more. “We should realize what is at stake for America; America is losing the whole region,” he said.

He dismissed allegations that Georgia started the fighting. “How can we attack Russia?” he asked. “That’s the ludicrous thing.”’

No, the ludicrous thing is that NATO entertained admitting a country headed by this screwball into the Alliance. It’s becoming plain that he thought he’d pick a fight that the West would have to come in and finish for him. Imagine having to send our soldiers to fight the Russians for this joker. No thanks.

Despite all the outrage spewing from our leaders, we’d do well to keep a clear head as to just what really happened in the Caucusus. Check out this opinion piece from Seumas Milne published in The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/russia.georgia

 

Fresh Out of Statesmen, Awash In Ideologues

Who will negotiate with Russian strongman Vlad Putin? It won’t be Georgia’s Saakashvili. He’s finished. It will probably take some sort of intermediary, a stand-in for Georgia, and that would be?

The Russia-Georgia conflict cries out for statesmen but, sadly, all we’ve got right now are ideologues and it shows. Ideologues are at their very worst in situations like this. They have little credibility and less persuasiveness. They’re often one-trick ponies. When they run up against a nation that’s not vulnerable to their coercion, we usually find that ideologues revert to angry denunciation and hollow gestures – tantrums, foot-stamping.

Unfortunately for our side, Vlad Putin is a hard case. When it comes to negotiators that pretty much rules out the Bushies or the Brownies. The Guardian suggests our intermediary might be Sarkozy.

What’s unclear is just what is to be negotiated. Here we may run into considerable asymmetry. What Russia is after may be a far more expansive than what Georgia wants or what Europe wants.

From Moscow’s perspective, Georgia may be a metaphor for its greater struggle against a steadily encroaching NATO. If the Russians can’t roll back recent NATO expansion into the Balkan and Caucasus regions, it may still serve Russian interests to sow doubts about the alliance and the security it truly offers among NATO’s new, eastern members.

Would NATO truly defend Romania against Russia? What do you think? Of course what I think and what you think doesn’t matter. What’s important to Putin is the impression left in the minds of those in places like Sofia and Bucharest, Kiev and Riga.

Georgia’s Saakashvili was playing a bluff when he attacked South Ossetia. He’s not stupid. He must have expected a different outcome than what he’s facing just a week later. What’s not clear is why. It will be fascinating when, months from now, Saakashvili spills the beans about why he pulled the trigger without noticing the gun was pointed at his own head.

A disastrous military adventure leading to the permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will surely spell the end of Saakashvili’s political future. It will also at least somewhat destabilize eastern Europe. America, after all, is in no position to reinstate Cold War-style militarization through this region.

What we probably won’t see anytime soon are the ripples now being felt by the NATO alliance. Whether Washington or Brussels wish to acknowledge it, NATO has suffered strains and at least hairline fractures over Afghanistan. There were some members who were uncomfortable with Bush’s stampede to expand the alliance into eastern Europe. The Georgia debacle will do nothing to ease those concerns and doubts.

Russia now says it will halt its blitz into Georgia short of Tbilisi. It’s also said it won’t recognize Saakashvili. Probably everybody agrees on that one. Imagine Saakashvili sitting at the table and signing off on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He’d be hanging from a light post within weeks.

So an outsider will do the negotiating for Georgia and, by implication, for the rest of Europe and (to some extent) NATO itself. Sarkozy? Perhaps but he too is an ideologue, not a statesman. The risk to that is that ideologues will probably see this as a simple question of Georgia and a couple of autonomous regions to be stripped from the loser. That’s an approach that would thrill Putin if only because it leaves all of the greater issues and his future options unmentioned and wide open.

We’d do well not to let the ramifications of this fiasco escape us. This isn’t an isolated matter. To Putin and the Kremlin it’s a couple of moves that may have a telling effect later in this chess game.