So this is what happens when a dying superpower and the belligerent amateurs in charge mishandle a conflict that is fast becoming a major world security scare. A flabby wordy stance by Bush initially, then suddenly some rhetoric that is hugely escalating Sakhashvili’s Georgian brinkmanship, and we may have World War III over a territory that is the size of Sydney’s greater West.
As soon as pictures of Russian ‘peacekeepers’ cowering in cellars in South Ossetia after Georgia’s incursion appeared on worldwide TV news, it was clear that Putin would take charge again and give the marching orders to restore Russian pride. Initially, as in a schoolboy brawl both sides claimed it was the other‘s fault, but the truth is that Sakhashvili did not poke the school bully but the local crime boss.
It is unclear whether we are witnessing sabre rattling or the old Soviet method: if in doubt move in a few tanks and occupy the capital. But in either case, Stalin’s ghost is rising over the hills of his Georgian home territory, where as a young swaggering gangster he cut his teeth with murder and mayhem before engaging in full-scale genocide as the Soviet Union’s dictator.
Despite the best efforts of their hero dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a lot of Russians still love Stalin, the monster from Tiblissi. No matter that he solved the nationality problem through genocide by starvation, incarceration and mass execution - he defeated Hitler and made the Soviet Union strong.
Putin wants to return to this glory after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and after the clownish Yeltsin drunkenly reeled through a defective and sickly democracy. Russians don’t relish being pushed around in areas which were their own fiefdoms once - rather like the U.S. attitude towards their ’backyard’ Central America. Also, there is the added bonus of controlling the pipeline that supplies a large amount of gas to Europe. And perhaps the greatest prize: the Georgian sea ports.
Georgia now finds she is paying horrifically for the unforgivable strategy error of her elected leader. Sakhashvili has unleashed a scenario whose dangers should have been obvious to anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of recent history, let alone Sakhashvili himself whose early years must have been learning Russian in the Soviet education system.
Meanwhile the amateurs in Washington are belatedly waking up to this brand-new conflict which once again is partly their own doing: goading an insanely proud Russia by building aggressive looking defence systems in New European countries like Poland and other once Russian dominated countries, cocking a snoop at Moscow, inviting Georgia, a shaky democracy into NATO without really meaning it. Turning NATO itself from a staunch bulwark during the Cold War into a hugely extended and therefore ineffectual conglomerate, seemingly only to annoy the humiliated Eastern power.
Now Bush is announcing that he is sending humanitarian aid into a completely unstable region, with dire warnings to Russia about the safety of American personnel. If a single American is killed through intent or happenstance, we may see what we thought had become unthinkable: a shooting war between Russia and the West.
One wonders how all this will play out in the American election. Is all this political karma ripening too much for Obama? The next days will show his mettle. The crisis in Georgia is too dangerous for idle party political rhetoric. Real statesmanship is needed, and we will see the shape of things to come, for better or for worse.