Georgia conflict could set back Russia's US relations 'for years'
US defence secretary warns Moscow: stop 'punishing' Georgia for western integration or risk damage to Washington relations
- guardian.co.uk,
- Thursday August 14 2008 17:59 BST
The United States has warned Russia its military operations in Georgia risk seriously damaging relations between Washington and Moscow for years.
Speaking to reporters about the delivery of humanitarian aid to Georgia, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said: "If Russia does not step back from its aggressive posture and actions in Georgia, the US-Russian relationship could be adversely affected for years to come."
The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has also stepped up pressure on Moscow, issuing another urgent call for Russia to honour the ceasefire with Georgia. She met with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, this afternoon to discuss the situation and will travel to Tbilisi tomorrow to have the peace agreement signed by the Georgian president.
"We would hope that he would be true to his word," Rice said, of the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev. "The provisional ceasefire that was agreed to really must go into place. And that means that military activities have to cease."
There are reports of continued fighting in parts of Georgia. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said humanitarian aid groups and UN monitors were struggling to reach civilians caught up in the conflict because of ongoing fighting and lawlessness.
A statement issued by his office said he welcomed the ceasefire agreement between Russia and Georgia "but notes that notwithstanding this agreement, violence continues, with civilians bearing the brunt."
He urged all combatants "to respect and protect civilians in accordance with international humanitarian law and human rights law."
In Washington, Gates launched a stinging attack on Russia for the scale of force used against Georgia, saying Russia's actions were designed to "punish" Georgia for daring to integrate with western organisations, such as Nato, which are outside Russia's influence.
"The Russians were prepared to take advantage of an opportunity and did so very aggressively in a way that went far beyond reasserting the autonomy of Abkhazia and South Ossetia," he said.
He ruled out, however, the use of US military force in Georgia, saying there was "no prospect" of American troops being deployed in the region. Military personnel will only be used in a humanitarian capacity to deliver aid to civilians, Gates said.
The comments from Gates and Rice came as tensions escalated between the US and Russia on the ground in Georgia. The US has accused Russia of sabotaging airfields and other military infrastructure in Georgia, while Russia has expressed concern about the American airlift to the crisis-torn region.
An unnamed US official told the Associated Press there was a deliberate attempt by Moscow to cripple the already battered Georgian military.
Reports from the scene indicated Russian forces were trying to disable Georgia's ability to fight again.
The allegations came as Russia's general staff said it had concerns about the type of cargoes the US was airlifting to Georgia.
Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the Russian army's deputy chief, told a news conference that Russian "peacekeepers" were in the Georgian port of Poti to conduct intelligence operations.
The general staff had previously denied its troops were in Poti, a Black Sea port with an oil terminal vital to the country's fragile economy.
Nogovitsyn said: "We have information that American military transport aviation say they are delivering a certain humanitarian cargo to Tbilisi airport, though they said we had bombed the airport two days ago. Let's ask them will they invite you [the media] to check whether it is humanitarian or not?"
What was really in the cargo, he asked. "It is of major concern to Russians."
He said over the previous 24 hours "we are just watching the situation. There are still snipers out there, certain groups have gotten through, and the provocations are continuing.
"We will settle things with everyone, and right now establishing peace is the main issue."
Reports today suggested Russian troops continued to move in and around Georgian towns despite a tense ceasefire.
Washington insisted it had had no problems with the Russians in getting humanitarian and medical aid into Georgia.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "We are not there to defend the ports, we are there to provide humanitarian aid."
The Georgian government said today that Russia had expanded its military presence in Gori, contradicting earlier claims that it was pulling out of the key town where its presence has threatened the ceasefire.
At least five explosions were reportedly heard near Gori and other reports suggested a military supply depot near the town may have been blown up by Russians.
Elsewhere in Georgia, a camera crew from Associated Press Television News saw heavily armed Russian soldiers and military vehicles in the western town of Zugdidi, some of whom were wearing blue peacekeeping helmets but others wore green camouflage helmets.
In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, reinforced the Kremlin's determination not to guarantee Georgia's borders.
"One can forget about any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity because, I believe, it is impossible to persuade South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree with the logic that they can be forced back into the Georgian state."
His remarks came as the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, was meeting leaders of the two separatist regions.
As confusion mounted about how Russia was responding to US calls to pull out its troops to end the week-long conflict, a Russian general said they would soon start to return control of Gori to Georgia.
Gori lies south of the disputed South Ossetia region on the main east-west road through Georgia.
Russian and Georgian soldiers are reported to have briefly confronted each other at a checkpoint on Gori's outskirts around midday local time, with Russian tanks hurrying to the scene to force the Russian troops to back off.
Some Georgian police are reported to have said that a Russian withdrawal broke down after their South Ossetian allies refused to leave.
Both sides have signed a ceasefire requiring forces to return to the positions they held before the conflict started last week. But the truce allows Russian forces to take unspecified "security measures".
The Kremlin could try to keep troops in Georgia while claiming to be protecting South Ossetia. Russian troops moved into the region six days ago after Georgia began a military operation to retake it from separatist control.
Russia: 'Forget' Georgian territorial integrity
Two American military planes delivered cargos of aid _ including food and medicine _ to Georgia's wounded and refugees. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he sees no need to invoke U.S. military force in the war between Russia and Georgia. He warned, however, that U.S.-Russian relations could suffer for "years to come" if Moscow doesn't retreat.
Russia's president met in the Kremlin with the leaders of Georgia's two separatist provinces _ a clear sign that Moscow could absorb the regions. And the comments from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared to come as a challenge to the United States, where President Bush has called for Russia to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia."
"One can forget about any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity because, I believe, it is impossible to persuade South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree with the logic that they can be forced back into the Georgian state," Lavrov told reporters.
The White House said it would ignore the comment.
"Our position on Georgia's territorial integrity is not going to change no matter what anybody says," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday. "And so I would consider that to be bluster from the foreign minister of Russia. We will ignore it."
In Washington, an American official said Russia appeared to be sabotaging airfields and other military infrastructure as its forces pulled back. The U.S. official described eyewitnesses accounts for The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The official said the Russian strategy seems like a deliberate attempt to cripple the already battered Georgian military.
"We are very concerned about these reports; it is a serious situation," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.
Georgia's coast guard said Russian troops had burned patrol boats and destroyed radars and other equipment at the port city of Poti, home to Georgia's main naval base and a major hub for oil exports to Europe.
An AP Television News crew in the oil port city of Poti saw one destroyed Georgian military boat, and two Russian armored vehicles and two Russian transport trucks. Soldiers who identified themselves as Russian peacekeepers blocked the crew from going further.
Russian General Staff Col.-Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn avoided comment on the Russian presence in Poti, saying only that Russian forces were operating within their "area of responsibility."
In Vienna, Victor Dolidze, Georgia's ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Russians were also looting the Georgian military base in Senaki.
On Poti's outskirts, the APTN crew followed a different convoy of Russian troops as they searched a forest for Georgian military equipment.
Russian troops also appeared to be settling in elsewhere in Georgia, including in the key city of Gori, where a checkpoint confrontation ended in the confused flight of Georgian forces.
In the morning, columns of Georgian police and military vehicles prepared to reoccupy Gori, but by afternoon, Russian tanks had blocked the entrance to the town, explosions were bursting on the other side of a hill and panicked Georgian troops were fleeing for safety in pickup trucks.
In Washington, a Pentagon official said U.S. intelligence had assessed that the number of Russians in Gori was small _ about 100 to 200 troops. But the Russian presence in Gori, only 60 miles west of Tbilisi, was viewed as a demonstration of the vulnerability of the capital.
Nogovitsyn said Russian troops went to Gori to establish contact with the local civilian administration and take control over military depots left behind by the Georgian forces. "The abandoned weapons needed protection," he said.
A Russian general in Gori had said Wednesday it would take at least two days to leave the city.
In France, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued another urgent call on Russia to honor the cease-fire with Georgia as she was bringing the formal agreement to Tbilisi to have it signed Friday by the president of Georgia, a democratic former Soviet republic that is now strongly aligned with Washington.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy said the documents are "intended to consolidate the cease-fire."
The EU-sponsored accord had envisioned Russian and Georgian forces returning to their original positions.
In Washington, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright said Russian forces appeared to be forming up in Georgia in preparation for withdrawal.
"It's difficult at the tactical level to know each and every engagement in each town," Cartwright said, "but, generally, the forces are starting to move."
U.S. aid arrived in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on Wednesday and Thursday, but Nogovitsyn said he was not sure that the U.S. planes carried exclusively humanitarian cargo. "It causes our concern," he said.
Besides the hundreds killed since hostilities broke out, the United Nations estimates 100,000 Georgians have been uprooted; Russia says some 30,000 residents of South Ossetia fled into the neighboring Russian province of North Ossetia.
Georgia, bordering the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia, was ruled by Moscow for most of the two centuries preceding the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia has distributed passports to most in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and stationed troops they call peacekeepers there since the early 1990s.
Georgia wants the Russian peacekeepers out, but Medvedev has insisted they stay.
In his meeting with leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Medvedev reiterated Moscow's longtime position that the regions should be allowed to choose their own affiliations.
More homes in deserted ethnic Georgian villages in the breakaway province of South Ossetia were apparently set ablaze Wednesday, sending clouds of smoke over the foothills north of the provincial capital, Tskhinvali.
One Russian colonel, who refused to give his name, blamed the fires on looters.
Those with ethnic Georgian backgrounds who have stayed behind _ like 70-year-old retired teacher Vinera Chebataryeva _ seem increasingly unwelcome in South Ossetia.
As she stood sobbing in her wrecked apartment near the center of Tskhinvali, Chebataryeva said a skirmish between Ossetian soldiers and a Georgian tank had gouged the two gaping shell holes in her wall, bashing in her piano and destroying her furniture.
Janna Kuzayeva, an ethnic Ossetian neighbor, claimed the Georgian tank fired the shell at Chebataryeva's apartment.
"We know for sure her brother spied for Georgians," said Kuzayeva. "We let her stay here, and now she's blaming everything on us."
North of Tskhinvali, a number of former Georgian communities have been abandoned in the last few days. "There isn't a single Georgian left in those villages," said Robert Kochi, a 45-year-old South Ossetian.
But he had little sympathy for his former Georgian neighbors. "They wanted to physically uproot us all," he said. "What other definition is there for genocide?"
___
Associated Press writers Misha Dzhindzhikhavili in Tbilisi; Mansur Mirovalev in Tskhinvali, Georgia; Jim Heintz in Moscow; and Anne Gearan, Matthew Lee and Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.
A Cut-and-Paste Foreign Policy
Posted on Aug 13, 2008
By Joe Conason
The discovery that John McCain’s remarks on Georgia were derived from Wikipedia is, to put it politely, disturbing and even depressing—but not surprising. Under the tutelage of the neoconservatives, who revealed their superficial understanding of Iraq both before and after the invasion, he favors bellicose grandstanding over strategic thinking. So why delve deeper than a quick Google search?
Worse still, neither he nor his advisers yet grasp how our misadventure in Mesopotamia has diminished American power and prestige. In fact, the Wikipedia episode—an awful embarrassment that would have devastated the presidential campaign of Barack Obama or any other Democrat—revealed an underlying weakness in Sen. McCain’s vaunted grasp of foreign policy.
Still enthralled by an exhausted ideology, he seems unable to analyze how we can avoid manipulation by allies or adversaries while advancing our own real interests. Those interests include the cultivation of democracy but also the promotion of regional stability and international security. Pretending to confront Russia from a position of weakness doesn’t help.
Frankly, the Arizona Republican’s latest foray onto the world stage suggested that he is not quite ready for the responsibilities of the presidency. When he emphasized that Georgia was “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion,” he sounded like a politician who will gladly damage our global influence merely for the sake of pandering to his partisan base.
Certainly the propagandists of al-Qaida must have been pleased to hear an ally of President Bush confirm that the United States is engaged in a worldwide crusade, for that is how such words are interpreted by Muslims. (And since when does American policy prefer nations for adopting any “official religion,” Christian or otherwise?) This was rhetorical blundering worthy of the Bush White House.
Now, Sen. McCain is not alone among politicians and pundits in exploiting the Georgian crisis to promote an exhausted ideology. Nor is he alone in ignoring the impact of Iraq on our ability to defend our allies by means of diplomacy or force. From the editorial page of The Washington Post to the office of the vice president, much sound and fury has emanated, signifying very little except a shared determination to ignore reality. When Dick Cheney threatens the Russians with “serious consequences,” what is he talking about? What would the Bush administration or its cheerleaders actually have done if the Russians had pushed on toward the Georgian capital?
Without any prejudice to the cause of Georgia’s sovereignty or its democratic aspirations, the true answer is not much, despite the illusions that our policy evidently encouraged among the Georgian leadership and people. Blustering aside, there was never the slightest chance that Europe or the United States would come to their assistance with military force against Russian troops. There are many reasons to avoid such a disaster, notably the enormous Russian nuclear arsenal, the European dependence on Russian energy supplies and the cataclysmic effect on the world economy.
Even if we contemplated the use of force, we scarcely have the capacity after squandering our power in Iraq. We can hardly bring effective diplomatic force to bear, either, beyond the tinny echo of White House blustering. The Russians must have laughed as they watched Georgian troops depart in haste from Iraq—and cackled when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations accused them of seeking “regime change” in Tbilisi. Are we telling them they cannot just invade a country they dislike, without international sanction, because they feel threatened?
There can be no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s Russia poses a challenge to the West, and to the next administration. It can be argued that Russian ambitions must be checked now to discourage Moscow’s bullying imperialism. It can also be argued that bringing the former Soviet republics into NATO only provokes the Russians into resisting encirclement by their Cold War enemies, and that we must engage Russia to cope with existential threats like nuclear proliferation and Islamist extremism. What can no longer be sanely argued is that reflexive ideology and confrontational bluster will secure our future.
We desperately need a new foreign policy that combines idealism with realism. And a president who doesn’t lift his talking points from Wikipedia.
Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.
Did You See The "Gaming" In George Bush's Speech? Or Did You Help His Cause?
Posted January 16, 2007 | 11:59 AM (EST)
Do you remember Frank Rich's September 2006 observation in " The Longer the War, The Larger the Lies"?
"You'd think that after having been caught concocting the scenario that took the nation to war in Iraq, the White House would mind the facts now. But this administration understands our culture all too well."
According to Rich, the President banks on the American people's tolerance for the absence of truth.
So, why should even an administration down in the polls try a different tack?" he wrote. They figure: "If you're a White House stuck in a quagmire..., what's the percentage in starting to tell the truth now? It's better to game the system."
And that's just what our President's last speech was -- another gaming of the system -- another example of pathological politics. He started out pale on my television. Never animated and never expressive, he delivered his speech exactly as planned -- lifelessly. Surely many if not most viewers wondered: Is he worried? Is he nervous? Is he tired? Each of these distractions was a small victory in itself.
The truth about lying is that people do it so long as it works. In his book, Telling Lies, Paul Ekman wrote, "In many deceits the victim overlooks the liar's mistakes (leaks), giving ambiguous behavior the best reading, collusively helping to maintain the lie."
So did we see a President who has never stopped lying aided by contrived ambiguity of expression - one we helped by misreading, or one who practiced his speech so often that he accidentally rid it of distracting, annoying and lie-revealing smirks to give us the plain truth?
No doubt some saw a President at his wits end dealing with unpopularity, or an ill President fighting the flu unable to gesticulate and emote.
As Michael Fox knows, "masking" is the term used to describe a locked, socially disturbing, non-expressive face. Parkinson's patients who do not know they're masking often have their intentions misread. Maybe Rush Limbaugh has some thoughts on whether the President's masking was real. Maybe Rush Limbaugh can tell us whether the President was faking at the ranch too - wizard that he is of lie detection - whether George Bush really cares what the American people think and cares more about his legacy than he said - whether the speech or the 60 Minutes version is, if either, the real President Bush. Or was the juxtaposition of the two another way to keep the American people confused and making excuses for an administration still gaming the system?
We need only return to last year's State of the Union Address to see how the deceptive shifting of focus strategy has served George Bush. On the critical issue of health care the President listed as a solution improved relationships between doctors and patients thereby distancing government from the onus of responsibility. With regard to responses to Katrina's victims he regaled us with references to justice, hope and equality instead of providing a sincere promise of housing and jobs. He reduced a nation's concern about corruption in the highest offices in the land to the petty obsession of pessimists.
Last weekend he and his handlers rather deftly shifted press attention away from speech substance to defects in style, from whether our troops should or should not leave Iraq to whether or not to have a "surge." Secretary of State Rice became the beneficiary of a ridiculous shift from well-deserved criticism to a supposed setback for feminism. Is that what you saw?
Yes, all in all, it was a good gaming week for the Bush Administration. Not bad at all.
"Courage as a Skill" by Dr. Reardon is in this month's Harvard Business Review
McCain and Wikipedia has vast comedy potential. (Feel free to propagate the picture.)
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