Georgia: planning and propaganda

Jamie is annoyed at how a perfectly natural bit of Russian forward planning is seen as evidence of nefarious intentions:

Have we really got so used to just blundering about that the existence of a plan — in this case the organisation of a response if attacked, the institutional capability to bring it about and the intelligence assets to get the timing right — in itself qualifies the Russians as aggressors?

Apparantly we have, as I’ve not only seen this argument –that their quick response time proved the Russians had planned this conflict and were just waiting for an excuse to attack — in the Danger Room post that irked Jamie, but also in the big NYT
writeup of the war
, as well as on various liberal geopolitical blogs. Considering the speed with which the Russians responded — Georgia started its invasion of South Ossetia on August the 7th and by August 10th the Russians had chased them back over the border– it’s a natural conclusion to jump to.

But it’s the wrong one. There’s nothing strange about the quick Russian response, considering the crisis had been simmering for months, had just heated up in July and gotten active in the first week of August. All armies make contingency plans and it makes sense for the Russian troops stationed in North Ossetia to have a plan on how to deal with a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. Furthermore, because there’s only one route between the two Ossetias, one that could be cut off relatively easy, it also makes sense for the Russians to start moving troops the moment Georgia attacks in earnest, as they can’t afford to be stuck on the wrong side of that tunnel when that happens. They need to establish a foothold outside the tunnel, keep it open for reinforcements and of course keep the Georgians from blowing it up. The Russian commander might even have standing orders to move in if Georgia gets too aggresive.

Now if we look what happened two weeks ago, we saw the Russians responding almost exactly in the pattern I just described. Their local forces moved into South Ossetia in a hurry, with some local air support but no air superiority and got to Tskhinvali roughly a day after the Georgians had started their invasion. At that time the Georgians were largely in control of that city, but there were still pockets of resistance. The Russian counterattack drove the Georgian forces from the city, but wasn’t strong enough to prevent them from regrouping and going back on the offensive. It was only after the weekend, on Monday and Tuesday that the Georgians fled South Ossetia and the Russians moved into Georgia proper. And it was then that I first saw stories saying that the Russians had planned this invasion.

By the time it became clear Saakashvili had gambled and lost, it was this narrative –that Russia had lured him into invading as to have a pretext for dealing with Georgia once and for all– that became established in the western media. With Georgian territory now in firm Russian control, it was easy to show Russia as the aggressor, as long as Saakashvili’s blunder could be ignored or whitewashed. The idea that Russia entrapted Saakashvili was tailor made for this.

War is over (if Putin wants it)

And for the moment it seems he wants it, as long as Georgia agrees to his terms:

The key demands are that the Georgian leader pledges, in an agreement that is signed and legally binding, to abjure all use of force to resolve Georgia’s territorial disputes with the two breakaway pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and that Georgian forces withdraw entirely from South Ossetia and are no longer part of the joint “peacekeeping” contingent there with Russian and local Ossetian forces.

Medvedev also insisted the populations of the two regions had to be allowed to vote on whether they wanted to join Russia, prefiguring a possible annexation that would enfeeble Georgia and leave Saakashvili looking crushed. If he balked at the terms, said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister: “We will be forced to take other measures to prevent any repetition of the situation that emerged because of the outrageous Georgian aggression.”

Saakashvili wanted a quick blitzkrieg war to forcibly rejoin South Ossetia with Georgia, confident in his army’s ability to defeat the Ossetian militia after all the financial support and training it had gotten from the Americans. He never prepared for the worst case scenario, but that’s what he got. Even now he’s belligerent, despite the loss of not just South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia and with the Russians having crushed his army, when it actually fought and not ran away that is. He’s the perfect example of how infectious the neocon/Bushite mentality is, in that he seems to think that bellowing loudly about how evil the Russians are and dodgy metaphors about Munich 1938 can change the reality of the crushing, unnecessary defeat his country has suffered.

The Russians on the other hand must be nearly as happy as The War Nerd –who was just happy to see a proper war for once– with this war. At last they got to humiliate one of the upstart breakaway republics that used to be theirs, not to mention the yanks by proxy, got Abkhazia and South Ossetia handed them on a platter and an opportunity how magnanimous they are by not overrunning Georgia entirely.

Fair point to Saakashvili though, he does seem to have won the media war, as most western media seem to either accept that Russia was the outright agressor, or that it somehow “forced” Saakashvili to invade South Ossetia, despite all evidence to the contrary. As The Exile calls it, Georgia made full use of “the CNN effect”, by quickly getting its talking points about the war across to the opinion makers, as well as having Saakashvili looking all western and decent and talking English, contrasting well with the much less western looking, odd talking Russians. Even the Russian spokespeople speaking English did so with thick accents and saying loony things; one I heard threatened nuclear war if the Ukraine made good on its threat to deny Russia’s Black Sea fleet a return to harbour. Moreover, the Georgians were better at getting moral support by showing footage of Russian atrocities, as I wrote on Monday. This went so far that CNN used footage of Tskhinvali ruins caused during the Georgian offensive when talking about the Russian attack on Gori! Well played Saakashvili, but it didn’t matter in the end.

The humanitarian cost of the War in South Ossetia

Lenny has a good point when he mentions that much of the reporting on the war for South Ossetia has reported extensively on Georgian victims of the war, but less so on Ossetian victims, even though Ossetia has borne the brunt of the fighting:

Incidentally, just so that this point isn’t lost in the deliberately confusing reportage. Yes, Russian jets are attacking Georgian targets and killing civilians. Yes, the reported civilian casualties “on both sides” is reported to be over 2,000. What is quite often not stated or just gently skated over in the reporting, so laden with images of Georgian dead and wounded, is that the estimate of 2,000 civilian deaths comes from the Russian government and it applies overwhelmingly to the Georgian attacks on South Ossetia on Friday. In fact, this is the basis for Vladimir Putin’s claims of a “genocide” against South Osettians by the Georgians (is he deliberately referencing the ICTY judgment about Srebrenica here?).
The Georgian side, by contrast, claims 129 deaths of both soldiers and civilians. So, if Russian figures are good enough to reference, why is the source of the figures and their context obscured? Why is being made to look as if Russian forces are behind most of those alleged deaths? Doesn’t this just amount to a whitewash of the actions of the Georgian army in South Ossetia? And why not mention 30,000 refugees too?

Seeing the reports on the various 24 hours rolling news channels over the weekend (Sky, BBC24, CNN, Euronews and Al-Jazeera) is that footage of the Russian bombardment of Gori was prominent on all of them, but I didn’t see the equivalent from Tskhinvali when the Georgians were bombarding that city. I don’t think this was a deliberate decision on the part of these channels as much as that there just wasn’t much coming in from there. It might seem harsh to talk this way when seeing the obvious suffering of the people cauhgt in the Russian bombardment, but with these images Georgia is winning the propagandawar, if not the war on the ground. Russia and South Ossetia might claim that many more civilians on their side were killed, wounded or driven from their homes, but without pictures these claims remain abstract, miss the immediacy of the Gori footage.

South Ossetia: why this war now?

map of Georgia, showing the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

The one big question that I keep coming back to is what in hell possessed Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili to start this war in the first place. Yes, this has been a crisis that’s been building for some time, with tensions having mounted again in the past month, but there was nothing going on that forced Saakashvili to escalate so drastically. What made him think invading South Ossetia was a good idea when he should know this would bring Russia in and the balance of forces never favoured Georgia, to say the least. As the events of the past few days proved, the Georgian army was no matchfor a serious Russian counteroffensive. Over at A FistFul of Euros, Douglas Muir speculated that it was a gamble on Saakashvili’s part, taking his chance to overrun South Ossetia before the Russians could mobilise:

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital)
and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains.

It is the sort of plan that is very tempting when the situation is right, if your own army is ready and willing and you can manage to find a situation in which the enemy is not. But it’s a high risk gamble, as we’ve seen again and it almost never pays off. In Georgia’s case, if Saakashvili did think this way and perhaps took Putin’s presence at the Olympics as a sign that Russia was distracted enough to risk the gamble, he made an awful mistake. He should’ve known the military commander on the gorund in North Ossetia also knows the facts as Doug sketches them above and that his first thought would beto get his troops through the tunnel as quickly as possible, just in case they do need to fight Georgian forces. Trying a blitzkrieg is the most obvious thing for the Georgians to try, so doubtlessly the Russians had contingency plans drawn up for this eventuality long ago.

But even had the Georgians succeeded in blitzkrieging South Ossetia, they still wouldn’t be in a good situation, as there still would be Abkhazia, the other, much larger breakaway region to content with. A Georgian victory would’ve brought them a long, slow guerilla war in South Ossetia and a Russian reinforced Abkhazia that would offer the constant threat of a second front. Which makes the decision to invade South Ossetia even more strange, with Abkhazia left alone. Perhaps Saakashvili thought that the latter was a lost cause anyway, even when conquered too easily invaded from Russia again and took the risk that had the gamble succeeded Russia would be content with bluster rather than military attack.

South Ossetia: taking sides?

Yesterday I said that it would interesting to see how the west will handle the war in South Ossetia, as after the support for the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, countries like the US, UK or Germany could hardly oppose the Ossentians doing the same, or could they? Well, Bush’s big speech on the subject seems to confirm that
the west has firmly chosen the Georgian side in the conflict and consistency of principle be damned.

The conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia (not to mention Abkhazia, the other breakaway region) and Russia is complex and should not be reduced to some black and white schematic pitting good Georgians vs bad Russians, but that seems to be the spin being decided upon it by western media. So yesterday we had the CIA connected Jamestown Foundation talking about “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia“, ignoring that this time it was Georgia that unnecesarrily escalated the conflict. At the Guardian’s Comment is Free, it was Svante Cornell who got the opportunity to say it was all Russia’s fault while at Crooked Timber, as always a reliable weathervane for the sensible transatlantic academic/liberal blogosphere, it was Maria Farrell who did the same.

It reminds me of what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia, when it was decided quite soon in that it was the Serbs that were the baddies, while the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were jugded to be the victims of Serbian aggression, ignoring the much more complicated reality of Croatian and Bosnian warcrimes in favour of a clean narrative. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has attempted to create a same of narrative for this conflict, presenting his country as the victim and himself as the democratic defender of a modern, western state, when he has been behaving in the same autocratic manner as a Putin, frex having the riot police fire on demonstrators. The fact that he speaks English seems to help an awful lot.