The War in South Ossetia, pt. 2: Thus Spake the Commentariat

Sifting through dozens of articles published in the past few weeks, polemics and punditry has reached a fever pitch on a forest-worth of op-ed pages in Europe and the US. Alas, I found the time to sort through several quotes and points – some insightful, others humorous – that deserve special consideration, IMHO.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pier believes that Russia will eventually prevent Ukraine from joining the EU, saying in RFE/RL: “While the Kremlin focuses its objections now on NATO enlargement, Ukrainians should assume that, if prospects develop for Ukraine's entry into the European Union, Russia will object vociferously to that as well.”

Former US Permanent Representative to the United Nations John R Bolton writes in the Telegraph: “Sending Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice to Tbilisi is touching, but hardly reassuring; dispatching humanitarian assistance is nothing more than we would have done if Georgia had been hit by a natural rather than a man-made disaster ... More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression ... Even this dismal performance was enough to relegate Nato to an entirely backstage role, while Russian tanks and planes slammed into a “faraway country”, as Chamberlain once observed so thoughtfully. In New York, paralysed by the prospect of a Russian veto, the UN Security Council, that Temple of the High-Minded, was as useless as it was during the Cold War.”

Mikheil Saakashvili appeals to readers of the Washington Post on 14 August: “Accordingly, we need to establish a modern version of the Berlin Airlift; the United Nations, the United States, Canada and others are moving in this direction, for which we are deeply grateful.”

Ukrinform on 15 August reports: “Sevastopol activists of pro-Russian public organizations and parties established duty on the raid for meeting the vessels of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. According to head of the Russian People's Assembly of Sevastopol Oleksandr Kruhlov, the meeting will be magnificent, with flowers and music. ‘The whole Sevastopol should find out that squadron is coming back at once and should participate in welcoming,’ Kruhlov said. ‘The ships are returning not only with victory, they participated in saving civilians of South Ossetia from Georgian genocide!’

On 14 August, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated, "You can forget about any discussion of Georgia's territorial integrity."

Former Deputy Secretary of State under Clinton Strobe Talbott responds to Lavrov’s comments in the Post: “Lavrov is a careful and experienced diplomat, not given to shooting off his mouth. That makes his comments all the more unsettling ... While Russia might see that outcome as proof of its comeback as a major power, the Balkanization of the Caucasus may not end there: Chechnya is just one of several regions on Russian territory that are seething with resentment against the Kremlin and that might hanker after a version of independence far less to Moscow's liking than what may be contemplated for Abkhazia and South Ossetia ... Among Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's important tasks in the days ahead is to get clarity on whether a Lavrov doctrine has replaced the Yeltsin one of 16 years ago. If so, big trouble looms -- including for Russia. Moscow's action and rhetoric of the past week have highlighted yet another, potentially more consequential respect in which this episode could bode ill for all concerned.”

Pawel Swieboda, director of Warsaw-based demosEUROPA says in the New York Times: “The reality is that international relations are changing ... For the first time since 1991, Russia has used military force against a sovereign state in the post-Soviet area. The world will not be the same. A new phenomenon is unfolding in front or our eyes: a re-emerging power that is willing to use force to guarantee its interests. The West does not know how to respond.”

Quoted in the Post, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who visited Tskhinvali reported as follows: “A doctor at Tskhinvali Regional Hospital who was on duty from the afternoon of August 7 told Human Rights Watch that between August 6 to 12 the hospital treated 273 wounded, both military and civilians. . . . The doctor also said that 44 bodies had been brought to the hospital since the fighting began, of both military and civilians. The figure reflects only those killed in the city of Tskhinvali. But the doctor was adamant that the majority of people killed in the city had been brought to the hospital before being buried, because the city morgue was not functioning due to the lack of electricity in the city. Independent journalists back up the account provided by Human Rights Watch. The Wall Street Journal, for example, yesterday reported finding Tskhinvali, where most of the fighting took place, mostly intact and with ‘little evidence of a high death toll.’”

The FT reports: “The Boeing 757 usually made available to the secretary of state was being used by Dick Cheney, vice-president, for a political fundraising trip to Colorado, forcing Ms Rice to take a smaller C-40. To critics, the second-class transport symbolised the Bush administration’s second-rate response to the crisis ... ‘There has been no vision or strategy to bring together the different elements of policy towards the region and no common front with Europe,’ says Mr [Jan] Bugajski, blaming the administration’s preoccupation with the Middle East and terrorism.”

Eric Margolis fries up some red herrings in the Winnipeg Sun: “The young, U.S.-educated Saakashvili became Georgia's president in 2003 after an uprising, believed organized by the CIA and financed by U.S. money, overthrew the able former leader, Eduard Shevardnadze. I interviewed Shevardnadze in Moscow when he was Mikhail Gorbachev's principal ally and architect of Soviet reform. Saakashvili quickly became the golden boy of U.S. right wing neocons, who saw him as a model of how to turn former Russian-dominated states into "democratic" U.S. allies. U.S. money, military trainers, advisers, and spooks poured into the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Israeli arms dealers, businessmen and intelligence agents quickly followed ... The Caucasus is Russia's backyard. Imagine Washington's response if Russian troops were deployed to Quebec.”

Former Ambassadors to Ukraine Carlos Pasqual and Steven Pifer note from Brookings: “Russia's powerful oligarchs have hundreds of billions of dollars in Western bank accounts. They would stand to lose a great deal in the event of a Cold War–style standoff that could conceivably result, at some stage, in the West's freezing of such holdings ... The U.S. government should talk to the Central Asian states as well; Russia’s pummeling of Georgia must have set off alarm bells in their capitals.”

Lilia Shevtsova, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center writes in the Moscow Times: “Russia's military response had another purpose as well -- to show that the Medvedev-Putin tandem can be tough. This show of strength was particularly important because the elite had started to fragment and the public was starting to wonder who was really in control of the country.”

At the 12 August demonstration in Tbilisi, President Lech Kaczyński quipped “[Russia has] shown the face that we have known for centuries.”

The Wall Street Journal surmises: “There's one other way the U.S. could hit Russia where it hurts: by strengthening the dollar. The greenback's weakness has contributed greatly to the record oil prices that have in turn made Russia flush with petrodollars and fueled Mr. Putin's expansionist ambitions. Crude prices continued to fall yesterday [12 August], below $115 a barrel, and further deflating that bubble would do more to sober up an oil-drunk Kremlin than would any kind of economic sanctions.”

Charles Krauthammer puts forward his solution to deal with Russia in the op-ed section of the Washington Post, first to “Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusan and Jamaican bobsled teams ... Bush needs to make up for his mini-Katrina moment when he lingered in Beijing yukking it up with our beach volleyball team while Putin flew to North Ossetia to direct the invasion of a neighboring country. Bush is dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to France and Georgia.”

Wall Street Journal reports: “Late that day [1 August], ethnically Georgian villages "came under tremendous bombardment from the South Ossetians," says William Dunbar, who was a correspondent for Russia Today, a Kremlin-funded television channel that promotes pro-Russian views. He visited the next day and says he tried to file a report on the shelling but his editors weren't interested. He soon resigned ... [Russian troops] triumphantly confiscated large amounts of U.S.-supplied military equipment that Washington had shipped to the Georgian army in recent years. ‘American rations are really tasty,’ said Col. Igor Konoshenko, speaking in Tskhinvali this week.”

Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitrii Rogozin asked correspondents in Brussels rhetorically: “Are you ready to risk your prosperity and risk your lives and the lives of your children for the sake of Saakashvili?”

Ronald D. Asmus in The Wall Street Journal Europe: “A core Western assumption since 1991 -- that Moscow would never again invade its neighbors -- has been shattered ... NATO also needs to reassure those partners likely to be the next targets of Russian pressure and possible aggression, first and foremost Ukraine. This means rethinking NATO's enlargement strategy. In the mid-1990s, NATO adopted an enlargement strategy based on integration and not as a strategic response to Russia ... We consciously raised the bar and requirements for new members. Our focus was less on protection than on democratic reforms to help anchor these countries to the West. But we also consciously left ourselves the option of lowering the bar in the future if the security environment took a turn for the worse. It now has done just that, and we need to shift our criteria again ... Last but not least, we should freeze the NATO-Russia dialogue in Brussels for the foreseeable future. If we are honest, this relationship has never become what we wanted: a channel for consultation and real cooperation. Moscow has walked away from many of its commitments in the Founding Act .. It treats the NATO-Russia Council as yet another platform for its anti-Western strategy. Russian NATO Ambassador Dimitry Rogozin behaves like an old-style propagandist seeking to sow dissension in the ranks of allies. We have lots of channels to talk to Moscow. Let's shut this one down until Moscow gets serious about doing business and not spreading anti-NATO propaganda.”

Patrick J. Buchanan asks rhetorically in an op-ed on 15 August: “How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?”

Stratfor Founder and CEO George Friedman assesses the conflict: “The Russians have now proven two things. First, contrary to the reality of the 1990s, they can execute a competent military operation. Second, contrary to regional perception, the United States cannot intervene. We would expect the Russians to get traction. But if they don’t, the Russians are aware that they are, in the long run, much weaker than the Americans, and that they will retain their regional position of strength only while the United States is off balance in Iraq. If the lesson isn’t absorbed, the Russians are capable of more direct action, and they will not let this chance slip away. This is their chance to redefine their sphere of influence. They will not get another.”

Academic Francois Heisbourg is quoted in the LA Times: "There's a strong element of paradox ... The one thing that could re-create the West is Russia acting in opposition to the West ... NATO had lost its way. The Russians have created a situation which gives NATO a raison d'etre again: to contain Russia."