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  • Fanning The Flames In Georgia

    FANNING THE FLAMES IN GEORGIA
    Written by Charles Scaliger

    The New American
    Tuesday, 30 September 2008 00:38

    An American defense of Georgia could risk nuclear war, yet the Bush
    administration seems determined to turn this brush fire into a Cuban
    Missile Crisis-like stare-down.

    Occupying the territory between the Black and Caspian Seas, the
    rugged Caucasus Mountains, where Europe and Asia meet, is a rough
    neighborhood. Home to dozens of different languages belonging to
    three entirely separate stocks -- the Indo-European, Altaic, and
    Caucasian proper -- and two major world religions, Christianity and
    Islam, the Caucasus are both a cultural crossroads and a patchwork
    of religious and ethnic animosities, some of them stretching back
    centuries. In an area where Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris,
    Dagestanis, Ossetians, Kalmyks, Russians, Kurds, Turks, and many other
    ethnicities and tribes jockey for control of land and trade routes,
    conflicts are frequent, often bloody, and almost incomprehensible to
    those foreign to the region.

    One of those long-standing conflicts, the rivalry between Georgia and
    a small autonomous region known as South Ossetia, grabbed headlines
    in August as a result of a quick and decisive war between Georgia
    and Russia. The war began when Georgian troops, who had only days
    earlier participated in an international military exercise that
    also included roughly 1,000 Americans, invaded South Ossetia and
    laid siege to Tskhinvali, the regional capital. Russia, long an ally
    of the South Ossetians (North Ossetia is an autonomous territory or
    oblast within Russia), counterattacked by land, sea, and air, routing
    the Georgian military and occupying South Ossetia, another Georgian
    region with secessionist designs named Abkhazia, and a considerable
    swath of Georgian territory, including the important Georgian port
    of Poti on the Black Sea.

    Western leaders, including George Bush, who have been grooming
    Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili for years, responded with
    self-righteous outrage, demanding a return to the status quo ante. The
    war was swiftly cast in the American media as a Soviet-style power
    play by Moscow, and dire warnings about a second Cold War were the
    order of the day. But as is so often the case, there is much more
    than meets the eye to the ongoing Georgian conflict, the latest but
    surely not the last conflagration in the Caucasus.

    More Than Meets the Eye The Ossetians, descendants of the Alans, a
    warlike tribe which participated in the invasion of the Roman Empire
    along with the Vandals and Goths, lived originally along the Don River
    but were driven south into the Caucasus in the Middle Ages during the
    Mongol invasion. Their language belongs to the Indo-European stock and
    is closely related to Iranian and Kurdish. Most Ossetians converted
    to Christianity, and more than 60 percent of them are Christian today,
    although there is also a sizable Muslim minority.

    The land where many Ossetians chose to settle so many centuries ago,
    Georgia, has one of the oldest cultures on Earth and was, after
    Armenia, the second country to adopt Christianity as its official
    religion. Georgia's peculiar Caucasian language has a writing system
    all its own and literature stretching back many centuries. Because of
    this, and because of her millennia-long occupancy of a large portion
    of the central Caucasus, Georgians have long viewed the Ossetians as
    modern interlopers, trespassers on hallowed Georgian territory and
    undeserving of independence.

    By contrast with the Ossetians, the Abkhaz people of Georgia's
    other breakaway region have been in the Caucasus since time
    immemorial. Abkhazia, stretching along the northeast coast of the
    Black Sea, apparently converted to Christianity in the first half of
    the first millennium A.D., and has been by turns an independent state,
    a Roman conquest, a principality within the Byzantine Empire, a part
    of the medieval kingdom of Georgia, and an Ottoman possession. Like
    Georgia and Ossetia, Abkhazia became a part of the Russian Empire in
    the first decade of the 19th century, and like them was later absorbed
    into the Soviet Union as a part of the Soviet Republic of Georgia.

    When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, the newly
    independent nation of Georgia incorporated the two former Soviet
    autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgian leader Zviad
    Gamsakhurdia lost little time asserting control over the two restive
    regions, launching a war in 1991 against Ossetia, which had been in
    open revolt for two years. Russia entered the war on the side of the
    Ossetians, and after more than a year of bitter fighting and several
    thousand deaths, a cease-fire was signed restoring to Ossetia some
    measure of the autonomy (but not full independence) that the Georgian
    parliament had revoked in 1990. Gamsakhurdia, although a genuine
    Georgian patriot and longtime dissident against the Soviet government,
    was, like many of his compatriots, unwilling to give any political
    recognition to Georgia's minorities. "Georgia for Georgians" was a
    popular slogan at the time of independence, and self-determination
    on the part of the reviled Ossetians was not to be -contemplated.

    No sooner had the Ossetian conflict cooled in the summer of 1992
    than Georgia invaded Abkhazia with several thousand troops, using
    the kidnapping of a Georgian government minister as a pretext. The
    Georgians took the Abkhaz capital Sukhumi with little resistance,
    but were eventually repulsed and driven from Abkhazia by a large
    force consisting of Abkhaz militia and sympathetic minorities from
    all over the Caucasus -- Circassians, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians,
    and others. The Abkhaz proceeded to expel or kill large numbers of
    Georgians, in a Balkan-style episode of "ethnic cleansing" little
    remarked in the West but possibly costing tens of thousands of lives,
    both Abkhaz and Georgian. Eduard Shevardnadze, former foreign minister
    of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and sometime president of Georgia,
    was in Sukhumi at the time and narrowly escaped death.

    >From the early '90s to the present day, an uneasy status quo has
    held sway in both breakaway republics, with both Georgia and Russia
    maneuvering for control of the regions. With the ouster of President
    Shevardnadze in 2003 and the rise of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgian
    politics have taken a decidedly pro-American tilt. Georgia sent a
    very large contingent of troops into Iraq -- all of whom were speedily
    evacuated and returned to Georgia, with American help, following the
    outbreak of the August war -- and, along with newly assertive Ukraine,
    applied for NATO membership.

    At the same time, Georgia has become a transit center for oil from
    the Caspian Sea. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, completed in 2005,
    crosses the country en route to the Turkish coast, and the Baku-Supsa
    pipeline, brought online in 1999, ends at the Georgian Black Sea port
    of Supsa.

    Given the intractable enmities bound up in the Georgian conflict,
    it would seem unwise for America to take sides or otherwise inject
    its influence, but that is precisely what the Bush government has
    chosen to do. Vowing to push for Georgian entry into NATO, the Bush
    administration has leveled a steady barrage of criticism against
    Moscow for behaving precisely as the United States -- or any great
    power -- is wont to behave in its sphere of influence. "Russia has
    invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic
    government elected by its people," said President Bush. "Such an
    action is unacceptable in the 21st century.... Russia's government
    must respect Georgia's territorial integrity and sovereignty." Given
    recent U.S. military interventions in Haiti and Panama (not to mention
    Iraq), the Bush administration's moral posturing over Russia's Georgia
    adventure (in which a number of Russian peacekeepers were killed before
    Moscow ever launched her counterattack) ring hollow, to say the least.

    Nor is there any basis for defending Georgia's NATO ambitions, at
    least from an American point of view. NATO already commits the United
    States Armed Forces to defend all sorts of out-of-the-way places of no
    strategic value to the United States. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,
    former Soviet republics all, are already members; is America ready
    to start World War III to defend them? Yet that is precisely what
    the NATO alliance will require of us, should Russia ever decide to
    re-annex them, and it will do the same vis-a-vis Georgia, should this
    trouble-prone Caucasus state ever become a member.

    The Chief Motive As events stand, the Georgia/South Ossetia War, a
    brief, inconsequential flare-up in a region where the United States
    has no business looking for trouble, has already led to near-naval
    confrontation between Russia and the United States in the Black Sea. At
    the time of this writing, Russian bombers are in the Western Hemisphere
    (in Venezuela) for the first time since the Cold War, and the United
    States is threatening further unspecified measures against Russia for
    her intransigence. For her part, Russia has withdrawn her military
    forces from most of Georgia proper, but has kept large garrisons
    in both breakaway regions and formally recognized the independence
    of both.

    In spite of the triviality of the Caucasus flare-up, the powers that
    be in the West seem bent on antagonizing Russia. Immediately after
    the Georgian conflict, the Bush administration announced a deal to
    station missile interceptors -- ostensibly to defend Europe against
    Iranian warheads -- in Poland. Russia responded by sending long-range
    bombers to Venezuela and threatening to re-militarize Cuba. Defense of
    Georgia or even of her oil pipelines seems inadequate rationale for
    potential nuclear war, yet the Bush administration seems determined
    to turn this regional brush fire into a Cuban Missile Crisis-like
    international stare-down.

    The chief motive for the exaggerated hullabaloo is the expansion
    of NATO, which continues to absorb more nations and redefine its
    organizational mission almost two decades after the disintegration
    of the Soviet Union. What was once touted as a military alliance
    to defend the West and its interests against the communist menace
    has been reinvented as an all-purpose global military force. NATO
    led the Western European and American intervention in the various
    Balkan wars in the 1990s, and NATO forces are now in command
    of the war in Afghanistan, a conflict far removed from Cold War
    animosities. "Presumed dead more often than the hero in a melodrama,"
    U.S. Ambassador to NATO R. Nicholas Burns wrote in 2003, "the new
    NATO keeps on defying the pundits' predictions by adapting itself to
    a rapidly changing world."

    Absorption of Georgia, the Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics
    has become a prime objective of the NATO organization, as NATO
    Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made clear in a recent speech
    in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. "The process of NATO enlargement will
    continue, with due caution but also with a clear purpose -- to help
    create a stable, undivided Europe," Scheffer said. "No other country
    will have a veto over that process, nor will we allow our strong ties
    to Georgia to be broken by outside military intervention and pressure."

    If the purpose of NATO is now the creation of a "stable, undivided
    Europe," Americans would do well to wonder why America still belongs
    to the organization. After all, America's military was created to
    protect America and her vital interests, not those of Europe, much
    less the remote and fractious Caucasus. Yet if the Eurocrats in charge
    of NATO have their way, Georgia, along with all her Caucasian broils
    and her blood feud with Russia, will be drawn into the alliance,
    an event that will make war between Washington and Moscow much more
    likely than it ever was during the Cold War.
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