What to make of the current little war going on in the Caucasus? One of the most fascinating aspects of the war has been the speculation as to who started it.
It would be extremely rare for a conflict to emerge from a vacuum without any prior hostilities going on, so as always the ‘who started it’ question is a matter of great debate with an answer that often comes down to a matter of opinion. What we do know is there is bad blood going back for many years, possibly centuries..
With a simmering low-level conflict that involves the odd shell careering over the border it would be fair to suggest that whoever takes it to the next level is to blame for turning it from a skirmish into a war. It appears that the Georgians took it from occasional shell lobbing to massive missile barrages, tank assaults with infantry and air strikes with the intention of taking the Ossetian main city by blitzkrieg. It’s almost an understatement to say this represents a dramatic change of intensity. There may be good reasons to escalate the violence to this level such as a spoiling attack on an enemy that was about to do the same to you. The Israeli Six Day War comes to mind as such a scenario. It seems unlikely that the South Ossetians were planning a full scale invasion of Georgia so if this was a spoiling attack then the targets would have to be the Russians. Now it appears that on the night of August 07 the Russians had not yet entered South Ossetia. A spoiling attack should have included the sealing of the Roki tunnel that separates North and South Ossetia in order to stop the Russians from reinforcing Tskhinvali. In any case this is a mad strategy as the Georgians had no hope of defeating the Russians and the Russians would be obliged, for reasons of national pride, if nothing else, to proceed to all out war. The Georgians would be better off to fiercely defend Tbilisi except that the Russians appear to have had no intention of attacking that city.
So was this some insane mistake on the part of the Georgian leadership or are there factors we are unaware of? Was Saakashvili gambling on the West coming in to assist him or less likely the Russians staying their hand? If it was a gamble it seemed like it had a one in a million chance of success. It is also an extraordinarily reckless thing to do gamble with the lives of not only the Ossetians and Georgians but practically the entire world. There must have been some discussion, some war room meeting, prior to the escalation of hostilities. Was there any dissent amongst the Georgian Generals concerning the wisdom of attacking Russia for surely attacking and killing Russian peacekeepers is akin to attacking Mother Russia herself? Usually this sort of reckless activity by a countries leader is a way of deflecting local criticism away from himself and out toward an external enemy. I wonder if this was the case.
The other, possibly more conspiracy minded theory, is that Georgia was encouraged by the US and possibly Israel to make the attack in the hope of stirring things up at home in order to improve the popularity of Republican Presidential hopeful McCain and or boost the arms industries. The wars against the rag tag Jihadis has not brought big contracts of new military hardware and development that a new Cold War would. This is perhaps being wise after the fact however the war seems to have resulted in this outcome. McCain now looks to have a fair chance of beating Obama. Evidence for this scenario is in the extraordinary number of US and Israeli ‘advisors’ on the ground in Georgia. When it looked possible that the Russians would advance on Tbilisi there was a mad scramble to the airport to get the hell out of there.
Whatever the truth of the matter this whole affair is extraordinarily interesting and worthy of more research and deep thinking. The next most interesting aspect of the war has been the propaganda war waged by both sides with Georgia deftly side-stepping the blame entirely and managing to draw in the sympathy of the entire Western world. This will be the topic of another post.
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