COMMENTARY: So why did Georgia blunder into this trap?

By
Owen Matthews
Last updated at 1:04 AM on 11th August 2008


Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili has made the biggest mistake
of his life. It's a mistake that could cost him his political career 
-  and in the process lose the West a vital ally.

Last
week, Saakashvili ordered his army to invade South Ossetia, a small
breakaway province of Georgia that has been independent since the
break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Georgians
succeeded in taking the rebel capital  -  but just hours later were
beaten back by Russian tanks that poured over the border to aid the
South Ossetian rebels.

Beaten back: Georgian soldiers sit on a tank,
moving near the town of Tskhinvali, after Georgia withdrew its forces
from breakaway South Ossetia, where they had been fighting Russian
troops for control
By yesterday evening, Georgian troops had been
routed from Ossetia, and Russian air-raids had destroyed military
airfields and towns deep inside Georgia.
Witnesses reported carnage in the Georgian city of Gori, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.
And
now tensions look set to escalate further as a different set of
Russian-backed rebels launch a second front in Abkhazia, another
breakaway enclave, and the Russian Black Sea Fleet led by the battle
cruiser Moskva moves to blockade Georgian ports.

 
Far from emerging victorious, Saakashvili's
American-trained army has been humiliated, and his appeals for help
from the West have been largely ignored.
How could
Saakashvili have made such a catastrophic misjudgment? The answer is
that he stepped into an elephant trap set for him by Russia.
Moscow-backed Ossetian rebels had been provoking the Georgians for weeks with artillery attacks and raids.
Saakashvili
took the bait. He sent in his army for an all-out grab. But the
Georgian offensive gave Russia just the excuse it needed to send troops
and tanks into Ossetia.
More importantly, the fact that Georgia launched the first attack has robbed Saakashvili of the moral high ground.

Saakashvili has compared Russia's invasion of Georgian territory to
Hitler's 1938 invasion of the Sudetenland, a largely German-speaking
province of Czechoslovakia.
But in truth, it was Saakashvili's own impulsive invasion that kicked off a spiral of hostilities he was always bound to lose.
Russia has once again proved itself a master of the brutal art of colonial politics.
Essential
to that strategy is the time-honoured principle of divide and rule.
Russia has backed the breakaway republics with money and arms for
nearly two decades in order to keep Georgia weak and divided.
And
in recent years, the more Saakashvili has courted Nato, the more
irritated the Kremlin has become  -  and the more support Russia has
lavished on the rebels of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Now
most citizens of the separatist provinces look to Russia for
protection, and thousands of Ossetian civilians fled across the open
border to Russia during the recent fighting.
'Saakashvili has been a thorn in Russia's side,' said Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
'Russia has been trying to get rid of him for years.'
Saakashvili, 41, is a particular hate figure in Moscow because he is so Westward-looking.
He
came to power in 2004 on a wave of popular support that swept away a
cronyish and corrupt old regime, and his programme was to bring Georgia
peace and prosperity by joining Nato and the European Union.
Saakashvili,
a U.S.-trained lawyer, quickly set about cleaning up his country,
firing every single member of Georgia's corrupt traffic police and
having university exam papers marked in the UK to avoid bribe-taking.
But
two things have set him on a collision course with Moscow. One is his
enthusiasm for the U.S. and allowing Nato bases in Georgia  - 
something that the Kremlin sees as an unforgivable encroachment on its
traditional sphere of influence.
At Nato's last conference in April, Georgia was given the green light for eventual full membership, which enraged Moscow.
The
other is Georgia's role in bypassing Russia's stranglehold of energy
supplies to Europe. The only non-Russian controlled oil pipeline from
Central Asia and the Caucasus runs from Azerbaijan through Georgian
territory to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Huge force: A column of Russian tanks in South Ossetia
A
parallel gas pipeline, which will play a vital role in European plans
to diversity their gas supplies when it is completed in 2009, also runs
through Georgia.
It is too late for Russia to do anything
to stop the existing pipelines  -  but a destabilised Georgia would
doubtless undermine Western confidence in non-Russian gas supplies, as
well as making investors wary of putting their money into future
pipelines.
Saakashvili has been brilliantly  -  if cynically  -  outplayed by the Russians.
He will doubtless experience a patriotic surge of support in the immediate aftermath of the confrontation.
But
ultimately the message from Moscow to Saakashvili is that he will never
bring the rebel province back under Georgian control.
That realisation will weaken his electoral support, probably fatally.
And
the message that Moscow has sent to the West is that Saakashvili,
Nato's closest ally in the region, is nothing more than a Caucasian
hothead, willing to drag Nato and Russia into a full-scale conflict
because of his own impetuousness.
It's impossible that Nato
will accept Georgia as a member as long as its rebel regions are
occupied by Russian troops  -  so in invading South Ossetia, Russia has
effectively drawn a line beyond which Nato cannot expand.
On
a strategic level, this is a turning point. For years, Russia was
powerless to prevent its former satellites in Eastern Europe from
joining the European Union. Even when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania  - 
not satellites, but actually part of the Soviet Union  -  joined Nato
in 2004, Russian objections were roundly ignored.

Hurt: A physician treats a man injured in a conflict in South Ossetia
Pro-Russian regimes in Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and Kyrgyzstan all fell
to Western-leaning leaders in a series of revolutions that the Kremlin
conspiracy theorists were convinced were fomented by Western powers.
Most
recently, Russia's attempt to block Kosovo's independence was ignored
by the U.S., to the deep annoyance of Russia's then-president Vladimir
Putin.
This time, it's different. Russia has been getting
steadily richer and bolder for years. Under Putin, funding for Russia's
armed forces has risen almost twentyfold. And Russia has also been
throwing its weight around diplomatically.
Some of those
spats have a distinctly Cold War flavour. Last month Russian generals
warned that Russian long-range strategic bombers carrying nuclear
warheads could start refuelling on Cuba.
That was a clear
response to U.S. plans to deploy missile defence batteries on Russia's
doorstep in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Carnage: A Russian TV channel shows a burning house in Tskhinvali
In invading South Ossetia, Russia has drawn a line in the sand.
Diplomatically, Russia may still be weak  - but on the ground, there's no arguing with a column of T-90 main battle tanks.
By
sending tanks against Saakashvili, the West's darling, Russia has
marked a point where Western influence over the former Soviet Union has
begun to roll back.
What Russia's nervous neighbours will
be asking themselves in the wake of the Ossetian invasion is just how
far in the other direction Russia now plans to roll its own influence.

https://www.dailymai

l.co.uk/news/article-1043428/COMMENTARY-So-did-Georgia-blunder-trap.html