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Financial Times
Reproach for the west on its role in Georgia

By Anatol Lieven

Published: August 13 2008 03:48 | Last updated: August 13 2008 03:48

The bloody conflict over South Ossetia will have been good for
something at least if it teaches two lessons. The first is that
Georgia will never now get South Ossetia and Abkhazia back. The second
is for the west: it is not to make promises that it neither can, nor
will, fulfil when push comes to shove.

Georgia will not get its separatist provinces back unless Russia
collapses as a state, which is unlikely. The populations and
leaderships of these regions have repeatedly demonstrated their desire
to separate from Georgia; and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister,
made it clear again and again that Russia would defend these regions
if Georgian forces attacked them.

The Georgians, like the Serbs in the case of Kosovo, should recognise
reality and formally recognise the independence of these territories
in return for a limited partition and an agreement to join certain
Georgian-populated areas to Georgia. This would open the way either
for an internationally recognised independence from Georgia or, more
likely in the case of South Ossetia, joining North Ossetia as an
autonomous republic of the Russian Federation. For the Georgians, the
resolution of their territorial conflicts would make it more likely
that they could eventually join Nato and the European Union – though
after the behaviour of the Georgian administration, that cannot
possibly be considered for many years.

Western governments should exert pressure on Georgia to accept this
solution. They have a duty to do this because they, and most
especially the US, bear a considerable share of the responsibility for
the Georgian assault on South Ossetia and deserve the humiliation they
are now suffering. It is true that western governments, including the
US, always urged restraint on Tbilisi. Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s
president, was told firmly by the Bush administration that he must not
start a war.

On the other hand, the Bush administration armed, trained and financed
the Georgian military. It did this although the dangers of war were
obvious and after the Georgian government had told its own people that
these forces were intended for the recovery of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia.

The Bush administration, backed by Congress, the Republican
presidential candidate John McCain and most of the US media, also
adopted a highly uncritical attitude both to the undemocratic and the
chauvinist aspects of the Saakashvili administration, and its growing
resemblance to that of the crazed nationalist leader Zviad
Gamsakhurdia in the early 1990s.

Instead, according to European officials, the Bush administration even
put heavy pressure on international monitoring groups not to condemn
flagrant abuses by Saakashvili’s supporters during the last Georgian
elections. Ossete and Abkhaz concerns were ignored, and the origins of
the conflict were often wittingly or unwittingly falsified in line
with Georgian propaganda.

Finally, the US pushed strongly for a Nato Membership Action Plan for
Georgia at the last alliance summit and would have achieved this if
France and Germany had not resisted. Given all this, it was not wholly
unreasonable of Mr Saakashvili to assume that if he started a war with
Russia and was defeated, the US would come to his aid.

Yet all this time, Washington had not the slightest intention of
defending Georgia, and knew it. Quite apart from its lack of desire to
go to war with Russia over a place almost no American had heard of
until last week, with the war in Iraq it does not have an army to send
to the Caucasus.

The latest conflict is humiliating for the US, but it may have saved
us from a catastrophic future: namely an offer of Nato membership to
Georgia and Ukraine provoking conflicts with Russia in which the west
would be legally committed to come to their aid – and would yet again
fail to do so. There must be no question of this being allowed to
happen – above all because the expansion of Nato would make such
conflicts much more likely.

Instead, the west should show Moscow its real will and ability to
defend those east European countries that have already been admitted
into Nato, and to which it is therefore legally and morally committed
– notably the Baltic states. We should say this and mean it. Under no
circumstances should we extend such guarantees to more countries which
we do not intend to defend. To do so would be irresponsible, unethical
and above all contemptible.

The writer is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s
College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation