Georgia was tricked, but by Russia or US?

By Ian Bell

23/08/08 "Sunday Herald" -- LET'S RUN through this again. Vladimir Putin is not a nice man. The KGB, with whom the young Vlad earned his reputation as a people person, was not Russia's answer to the Rotary Club. As a direct consequence, Russian traditions of democracy remain wafer thin, a cracked veneer that fails utterly to conceal thuggery, rigged votes, oligarchic mafias, corruption, and the corpses of journalists. Are we clear?

Russia's current identity is composed, meanwhile, of a volatile mixture of intense nationalism and paranoia. Its rulers, whatever their labels, take it as read that their country exists under permanent threat of encirclement by its enemies. Now, here's the tricky part: there is nothing currently to suggest that they are mistaken. Intense nationalists of a different stripe, feed the paranoia of the intense nationalists in Moscow.

This is not, of course, the story we have been hearing. When the United States − having shredded the anti-ballistic missile treaty that gave nuclear deterrence its single justification − bribes Poland into housing rockets pointed at the Russians, we hear only of a "shield". When Georgia launches smaller rockets at a South Ossetian town, in defiance of all the humanitarian rules, we hear only that a freedom-loving but "provoked" Georgian leader has stepped into a cunning Russian trap.

It may be, of course, that Georgia's President Saakashvili committed just such an act of astonishing, inexplicable folly. North Ossetia, ethnic and cultural twin to its disputed neighbour in the south, is part of the Russian Federation. Putin and those who support him - a clear majority, as no-one disputes, of Russians and Ossetians - meanwhile have difficulty understanding the concept of Georgian independence.

But when Saakashvili offered the gift of a direct military challenge by shelling Ossetian Tskhinvali, hospitals, parliament and all, how was Russia supposed to react? By asking politely for clarification of Georgian intentions? Imagine the French have just shelled the Channel Islands. What's our next move?

A daft analogy? Not as daft, I suspect, as the claim that the US, with military advisers on site in Georgia busily equipping and training its army, tried and failed to dissuade Saakashvili from launching a war. Does America have so little influence over a tiny client state that depends entirely on American goodwill? Or did Saakashvili somehow get the wrong idea from someone somewhere about the nature and scale of likely US support and US responses? Nothing else makes any sense.

Much of the West's media have accepted the script as written, and accepted it with enthusiasm. Some people, it seems, really miss the Cold War. As political eminences in the US tell it, that conflict never ended. Who knew? George Bush senior and the "new world order" never happened. Without missing a beat, we are back to "containing Russia". The proportionate response to a five-day war in a postage-stamp region of the Caucasus is the placing of missiles in Poland. Perhaps the Cubans should offer a view?

Let's say, for argument's sake, that Saakashvili did indeed make a grievous error. Let's accept that a Harvard education cannot eradicate a tendency to hot-headedness. It's still either/or. Either Saakashvili was misled, or he is dumb. Either way, does that qualify him to be in a position to whistle-up the nuclear arsenals of Nato should he have another rush of blood to the head?

David Miliband, our vastly-experienced Foreign Secretary, thinks it does. The latest junior Churchill argues that, precisely because Georgia took a kicking from the Russians, its membership of Nato should be nodded through forthwith. This was precisely the outcome sought by the US at a Nato meeting in Bucharest in the spring, long before anyone had heard of South Ossetia.

You can see how that one would run in State Department strategic gaming. So the Russians get a little war, they would say, and the chance to flaunt their cojones. If this plays, we get to overcome the objections of the Germans, the French and the Italians and plant another Nato flag in Russia's back yard. This is known, I think, at least to the never-recently-sane, as a price worth paying.

Does a leader with Saakashvili's lamentable credentials in war, and as a democrat, really become entitled to have another crack at the Russians with full Nato backing? Such is the meaning of article V of the organisation's treaty: one for all and all for one. If a Nato member is attacked, its brethren must come to its aid militarily. We should grant that licence to the Rocket Man of Tbilisi? Miliband says we should.

Putin and his stooge, Russian "President" Dmitry Medvedev, are reliable villains. Russia says that Poland, with its planned shield, must go back on the nuclear target list: the Apocalypse Express gets its headline. Yet none of this, bizarre as it sounds, should be Europe's real concern.

We are being sucked in, suckered and conscripted. As an economically embattled US flails after former glories, it fashions Nato into a blunt instrument. Whatever the organisation's purpose during the Cold War, it currently stands revealed as an expeditionary force on behalf of Washington's interests. That is not a useful development for Nato, Europe, America or the world.

Georgia should be proof enough. We know that Putin's Russia is not to be trusted. But we also know a simple fact: in South Ossetia, Saakashvili started the shooting. Had the United Nations been allowed to function we might have been talking about faults on both sides. Instead, we are offered a new Cold War as though no other alternative is possible.

Far off in Afghanistan, meanwhile, 10 young Frenchmen die in a single engagement; then three Poles. They join the list of Britons, Canadians, Dutch and Americans that creeps towards 200 lives lost in 2008 alone, mostly for the sake of a Nato mission in a war on terrorism declared, forgotten, botched, forgotten and botched again under Washington's direction. So remind me: where is Kabul, exactly, in relation to the North Atlantic?

The city is rather closer to Pakistan, source of the Taliban's endlessly-replenished supplies of men and guns, a country that has just discarded America's latest favourite general. Pervez Musharraf leaves behind a state with ungovernable borders that is also − let's take another bow − armed with real, rather than Iranian potentially-perhaps nuclear weapons. Those in the Taliban and al Qaeda, people who would do us actual harm in our own towns and cities, given the chance, cannot feel too disgruntled.

Another Cold War in Europe and a hot war on the old Northwest Frontier: as a scorecard for Nato, these involve precious few bonus points. You would have to mark them as abject failures. Afghanistan begins to seem very like Europe's long-avoided Vietnam. The disastrous challenge and counter-challenge with Russia meanwhile has a very creaky and disreputable sort of plot line. Nato, amid it all, has become America's proxy.

It was always that, in most senses. You suspect, however, that an expiring Bush administration has found its gimmick, finally. How to draw the sceptical and under-achieving Europeans back in to the great global cause without deferring to their doubts and finer feelings?

Forget threats, insults, or expressions of undying friendship: binding treaties will do. Treaties, that is, and a couple of decent scripts. Wag the dog. Do it all with a crisis in a place with a name that might just have been invented. Do it with an unending war on the authors of permanent, inchoate, indefinable alien threat.

Putin, Saakashvili, and some Afghan warlords will be happy to oblige. David Miliband will not even hesitate. And the matinee crowds will be none the wiser.