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When Mikheil Saakashvili’s plans misfired

Georgia’s maverick President Mikheil Saakashvili has gambled and lost. What looked to him like a perfect game plan to honour his five-year-old pledge and reassert control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia turned into a crushing and humiliating defeat, killing any hope for Georgia to bring the breakaway territories back into its fold.

When Mr. Saakashvili ordered his army to swoop down on South Ossetia on August 7, he was confident that his elite U.S.-trained commandos would easily thrash the ragtag separatist army and some 600 Russian peacekeepers deployed in the tiny region, and blow up the Roki Tunnel, the only lifeline linking South Ossetia with Russia before Moscow had the time to react.

The U.S.-trained Georgian leader, brought to power in a U.S.-engineered “Rose Revolution” five years ago, was equally sure of western support. After all, it is the United States and other NATO countries that have armed Georgia to the teeth, providing it with hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles, warplanes and helicopters, gunboats and anti-aircraft weapons, while American, Turkish and Israeli instructors have trained thousands of Georgian troops. And it was President George W. Bush who declared Georgia America’s “strategic partner” in the Caucasus and beacon of democracy in the former Soviet Union. Mr. Saakashvili, who had sent troops to fight alongside the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, firmly counted on U.S. backing in his invasion of South Ossetia.

Mr. Saakashvili has become a pawn in the U.S. presidential election game. A senior Russian parliamentarian said the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration prodded the emotionally unstable and arrogant Georgian leader into the armed misadventure to help Republican John McCain win points in the race against his Democratic rival, Barack Obama.

“I have information that Vice-President Dick Cheney was the brain behind the Georgian attack,” said Kremlin-connected Deputy Sergei Markov, who also heads the Institute of Political Analysis in Moscow. “The true goal of the operation was not to seize South Ossetia, but to trigger a full-scale conflict between Russia and the West.”

Mr. McCain used the Georgian crisis to push the security agenda in the face of what he described as “revanchist Russia’s” efforts to “drive to put an end to the existence of the Georgian state.” This enabled him to catch up with Mr. Obama in the race. Mr. McCain’s complicity in the Georgian war received further proof when it became known that his top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, had been hired by Mr. Saakashvili to lobby for Georgia in the U.S. Congress and made his firm $2 million off the Rose Revolution in Georgia.

Moscow’s envoy to the United Nations openly accused Washington of giving the go-ahead for Georgia’s invasion. “It is hard to imagine that Georgia would dare launch its aggression against South Ossetia without the nod from Washington,” Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said.

The attack was ideally timed to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing and summer holidays in Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev was on vacation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Beijing, and Parliament on a summer recess. This should have at least delayed reaction to Georgia’s assault.

Mr. Saakashvili was under no illusion that the people of South Ossetia would welcome re-unification with Georgia. Like nearby Abkhazia, South Ossetia fought a bitter war with Georgia in the early 1990s when Tbilisi attempted in vain to crush the two regions’ bid for independence. Since then, Georgia has had no control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which overwhelmingly voted in referendums for independence. Mr. Saakashvili’s plan was to gain territories and drive out the ethnically different Ossetian and Abkhaz people. This explains why the Georgian assault on South Ossetia began with blanket barrage fire of Grad multiple-launch missiles, which razed to the ground the capital Tskhinvali and other Ossetian townships and villages, killing at least 2,000 people and causing the exodus of more than a half of the region’s 70,000 population to neighbouring Russia.

Russia has accused Georgia of genocide and promised to prosecute its leaders in an international tribunal.

The Georgian leader fatally misjudged Russia’s will to intervene. Within 24 hours Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia, decimating Georgian forces, while Russian warplanes flattened all major military facilities in Georgia.

The five-day war has spelled a catastrophe for Georgia. Its forces have been routed and driven out of Georgian-populated enclaves in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Its war machine has been destroyed. Mr. Saakashvili was forced to agree to renounce the use of force against South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which effectively deprives him of the only instrument for returning the separatist territories. Mr. Medvedev has said the future status of both regions will be decided by the people who live there and no one else. Mr. Saakashvili’s own political survival hangs in the balance as the full extent of the Georgian debacle is sinking in. Moscow has categorically refused to talk to him ever again.

The crisis has redefined the strategic equations in the Caucasus and Russia’s relations with the West. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia used military force outside its borders. The ferocity of retaliation has forcefully demonstrated that new Russia has the will and the wherewithal to stand up to its interests. Mr. Medvedev has clearly stated the Caucasus remains in Russia’s strategic orbit. “Russia has been and will ever be a guarantor of security in the Caucasus,” he said as he announced that the military operation had been successfully completed.

Mr. Saakashvili’s blunder in taunting Russia gave Moscow a golden opportunity to draw a red line to further NATO expansion in the former Soviet Union. European leaders were awed to think what would have happened had they yielded to U.S. pressure and granted Georgia a road map for NATO membership at the alliance’s Bucharest summit in April.

The Georgian crisis showed the West’s inability to challenge a resurgent Russia. The U.S. vowed to exert “the full force of diplomatic activity of the Euro-Atlantic community” as its closest ally in the former Soviet Union was being flogged. The European Union, which depends on Russia for 40 per cent of its energy needs, failed to muster enough consensus to even issue a statement on the Georgian crisis.

Europe has reaped the storm it sowed in Kosovo. Moscow warned that western support for Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia would explode separatism-rooted frozen conflicts in the former Soviet Union and across the world. Western censure of the Russian action only serves to expose the West’s hypocrisy after what it did in Kosovo, Iraq and Yugoslavia. In Georgia, Russia paid back the West in kind.

“Saddam Hussein, of course, deserved to be hanged for destroying several Shia villages,” ironically remarked Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, “whereas Georgian leaders who have wiped out towns and villages, and sent tanks rolling over women and children, must be taken under protection.”

The Medvedev-Putin power tandem has passed with flying colours the test the West set up for the duo in Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili and his western sponsors strongly counted on the perceived weakness of Russia’s new leader and his alleged frictions with his predecessor-turned-Prime Minister. Moscow’s skilful and determined handling of the South Ossetia crisis overturned these hopes. The Russian leadership worked through the crisis as a closely-knit team. While Mr. Putin may still be the leader in the Kremlin power duo, Mr. Medvedev, who marks his first 100 days in office this week, showed that he is fast emerging from his predecessor’s shadow.

The Georgian crisis is bound to affect Russia’s relations with the West. There are demands to exclude Russia from the G8, block its admission to the World Trade Organisation, and put on hold talks on a strategic partnership pact with the European Union. But no deterioration in East-West relations can obscure the fact that the balance of power in Eurasia has shifted, as the U.S. intelligence think tank Stratfor stated. “The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region,” Stratfor head Jeorge Friedman wrote in an analysis of the Georgian crisis.

“Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power.

“The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.”

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