USA Complicit in Georgia?

What Does America Want in Europe?

Russia doesn’t get good press in the West. Despite the end of the Soviet Union, the introduction of a market economy and the diversification of the press, the homeland of Solzhenitsyn, remains “the gulag archipelago” in the eyes of most Westerners. And the Russian President, now Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB. There’s nothing to be done about it. Chase prejudices out the door, and they come in through the window. Didn’t people bring up that the American President Carter was a peanut salesman, even after he obtained the signature of a peace accord between Egypt and Israel?

Furthermore, for the Western press, it’s evident that on August 8, 2008, the opening of the Olympics in Beijing, it was nasty Russia that, by surprise, attacked Georgia, a little democratic country in the Caucasus, and spread panic there. A country, furthermore, led by a likable young man, who speaks English and French, and who studied at Columbia University in the United States.

At the same time, even the most adamant of Moscow’s adversaries have to recognize now that Georgia’s military forces were the ones which attacked the pro-Russian separatist province of South Ossetia, bombing its capital and killing Russian soldiers who had been stationed there for fifteen years, by the decision of the UN, for peacekeeping purposes. Whether the Ossetians’ and Abkhasians’ demands for renewed independence are legitimate or not, they call for a debate, not an act of force. Especially if, as the Georgians claim, Russians had been preparing for such an action for a long time, then why this initiative on the part of Mikhail Saakachvili? Did he take it on his own or in complicity with the U.S.?

To me, it’s not a question of defending the Russians, whose brutality in response to any aggression against their interests is well-known (Afghanistan, Chechnya,…). It’s an effort to try to understand the strategy and objectives of President Saakachvili, in provoking a war that allowed the Russians to destroy, in three days, all of Georgia’s military potential. For this, the Georgian President will certainly have to answer to his electorate, once the dead are buried and the ruins cleared. But what was George Bush’s role in this business?

I was struck, watching television, by the American President’s response to the announcement of the fighting in Ossetia, and by that of Vladimir Putin. Both were watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. The Russian Prime Minister immediately flew to the Caucasus, without even stopping in Moscow; the American President, meanwhile, contented himself with a few statements, sounding almost detached, from Beijing.

It’s important to remember that Bush hasn’t ceased, since his accession to the Presidency, to work towards Russian economic and geographic isolation. The true reasons escape me. Unless he believes, as his neoconservative advisers do, that there is no difference between the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the Russia of today. The battle for world hegemony between the two superpowers still feels awfully current.

For a moment, Putin believed in Bush’s friendship and tried to assure him of Russia’s good intentions. After all, didn’t he dismantle the Russian military bases in Cuba and Vietnam? Didn’t he integrate Russia into the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe)? How disillusioned and angry must he have felt upon seeing the United States, during the same time, install military bases in Central Asia, Georgia, the Czech Republic, and Poland?

I’m getting to Europe. This is now the second conflict on the continent, after the one that set the ex-Yugoslavia aflame. So it’s up to Europe to solve it. Indeed, this is how Nicolas Sarkozy understood it, as he demonstrated by reporting directly to the field. But in the face of this confrontation—an anachronistic one, it must be admitted—between Russia and the US, what can Europe do? First of all, it can exist. As Stefan Zweig and so many others before him would have wanted. To exist, can Europe accept on its soil the presence of NATO forces, those of an organization created in 1949 in Washington in order to oppose the expansionist aims of the Soviet Union? One can, as in my case, not be anti-American and still believe that European independence is not compatible with its membership of NATO. Their interests are not always identical. Let’s remember the Iraq war.

What, in short, does George W. Bush want in Georgia? I believe, for my part, that Saakachvili’s strike in Ossetia was prepared with American counselors and approved by Condoleezza Rice during her last trip to Tbilisi. Neither Bush nor Saakachvili was surprised by the violence of the Russian response. Their strategies depended on a Russian response that would provoke the media to mobilize. Even the August 12 meeting in Tbilisi of russophobic leaders—Polish, Ukranian, and Baltic—was planned. I bet that, in the days to come, the “danger” the military and economic strength of the country of Gazprom poses to its little neighbors will be capitalized upon. This “danger” will justify a posteriori the expansion of the American presence in these regions. To the detriment of the solidarity and integrity of Europe.

Unlike the Russian leaders before him, Vladimir Putin is not a chess player. He’s a judo practitioner. A judo practitioner doesn’t need to be stronger to win; he needs to know how to use the strength of his adversary to pin him to the ground.