Your tax dollars at work: Russia v. Georgia

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Aug 12, 2008 at 15:46:48 PM MST

Kaplan:

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It's heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times-officials, soldiers, and citizens-wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It's infuriating because it's clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia's separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions-for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia-with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

Now, there's some speculation that the US gave "tacit" support to a Georgian incursion into South Osesetia; for the record, Robert Farley's take seems more reasonable, that "motivated bias on the part of Saakashvili may have led him to believe that the Americans were making encouraging noises, because he wanted to believe the Americans were encouraging him."

Frankly, I don't think even the idiots in the Bush administration would green light a provocation of the irritated superpower on Georgia's border. Then again, I've been wrong about these folks before.  

Many of us who opposed the Iraq War railed against the invasion because it violated centuries-old precepts on what is a "just war"; the worst violation of just war theory was the pre-emptive, unilateral nature of the invasion. That is, it was unprovoked and avoidable. For the most part, our indignation over those violations was moral. We didn't want our country to engage in immoral war; especially if our government was supposed to be a reflection of our will. That is, our country's faults are - because of our democratic contract - also our own.

But with Russia's invasion of Georgia, we may be seeing why abiding by just war theory is practical. Creating a set of rules, if you will, for international conflict and abiding by them makes it easier to muster multilateral blocs to oppose aggressive or rogue nations. But if we violate those rules - bald-faced, unashamedly - and get away with it, what message is that sending to the international community? And how does that hamstring our ability to build coalitions to react to similar acts of aggression by other nations?

Russia's Georgian aggression may be, in part, the result of our ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Especially if Russia's attack is in part motivated by Georgia's oil and oil pipelines -- don't you think Russia sees our invasion as a signal we're willing to go to extremes to secure oil fields?

It's ironic then, if you consider neoconservatives favored unilateral aggression to protect US interests and promote "democracy" (read, US-aligned regimes) because they thought that the US was the only superpower in the world. Now US aggression may spur Russian rearmament and regional aggression.

Basically, we squandered whatever opportunities we had as the world's sole superpower...