Contrary to Vladimir Putin’s fantasies, it is becoming clear that Moscow was primed to move into South Ossetia.
“Our decision to engage was made in the last second as the Russian tanks were rolling — we had no choice,” President Mikheil Saakashvili told journalist Melik Kaylan. “We took the initiative just to buy some time. We knew we were not going to win against the Russian army, but we had to do something to defend ourselves.”
His remarks signaled a diplomatic offensive on the part of the beleaguered democracy. Many media commentators in the West have too readily taken Russia’s account of events at face value and blamed Georgia for provoking the Kremlin.
“We have a case of a small democratic nation, attacked by a large autocratic neighbor,” said David Bakradze, the chairman of Georgia’s parliament, David Bakradze, addressing a meeting at the Democratic Convention in Denver.
“I think the case speaks for itself. What Georgia is guilty for is … that we don’t want to be part of this autocratic system and we want to have a right to choose, to choose our democratic system, to choose values, and to choose our security arrangements like NATO,” he told a meeting of international leaders sponsored by the National Democratic Institute. “It’s about values, democracy, and protection of human rights. It should be very important to liberals.”
Russia’s actions betray its fundamental weakness, according to a senior State Department official. Three successive US presidencies rightly encouraged Russia’s integration with the wider world, said Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. But the Kremlin “has now put all of that at risk, because Russian cannot simultaneously behave like the Soviet Union toward its neighbors like this is 1968 and act as if it is 2008 when it comes to the WTO.”
Without justifying Georgia’s initial actions, Fried came to its defense. “Georgia is a flawed democracy, a democracy in construction. You don’t help them by whitewashing their problems or defending a bad decision. But you don’t want it crushed,” he said.
A new history of the Caucasus invokes “the ghost of freedom” and offers Europe’s “inexorable march” towards liberal values as offering hope to the region’s small states. But one reviewer at least believes the West is unlikely to challenge Russia in its own backyard:
“For over a thousand years the Georgians and Armenians have appealed to Europe for support as fellow Christians, as Europeans by culture, if not by geography, and after being strung along by Crusaders, by Louis XIV, by various Popes, by Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and both Bushes, can still not believe that the answer they get will always be a perfunctory apology that deeper interests of state force the West to take sides with its major trading partners, not its cultural and spiritual brothers.”
Indeed, notes Princeton philosopher Michael Walzer, contrary to its claims, Russia’s invasion was not a ‘just war’ humanitarian intervention, but it still represents a major defeat for the US and the EU. “It demonstrates that these two great powers, publicly committed to the advance of democracy in Europe, are unable to defend the territorial integrity or physical security of democratic Georgia,” he observes.
Georgian workers are mobilizing to protest the Russian invasion, the NED-affiliated Solidarity Center reports. Swelling numbers of union activists from the Georgian Trade Union Confederation marched to a Russian military checkpoint.
“Even after the Russians withdraw, we will need a lot of support,” said program director Robert Fielding, speaking from Tbilisi. “Too much damage has been done, too many people displaced and traumatized.” The Solidarity Center has set up a special fund to provide food, shelter, and clothing to Georgian workers and their families (click here to make a tax-deductible contribution).
[...] contrasted the international solidarity and flood of aid that Georgia had received with Russia’s meager pay-off from the invasion. [...]