<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> WorldTribune.com: Mobile — Putin's chess move in Georgia, timed to start of Olympics
Putin's chess move in Georgia, timed to start of Olympics

Tuesday, August 12, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

The stakes could hardly be higher in the current outbreak of fighting between Russian and Georgian forces even though it occurs in an obscure part of the Caucuses where Europe meets Asia.

The top of the iceberg is the viability of Georgia itself. With less than five million people and a fragile representative government, its ancient Christian civilization has been struggling to escape from centuries of colonial domination by the Persians, the Ottoman and Tsarist empires and then some 60 years of Soviet Communism. [The ruthless long-time Soviet dictator, Ioseb Jughashvili, Stalin, from the Russian word for steel, was himself a Georgian, possibly of descent from the Ossetian minority now at the center of the violence.]

The so-called Rose Revolution of 2003 overthrew the old Soviet apparatchik regime left behind after the implosion of the Soviet Union a decade earlier. And this succesor regime has been vociferously pro-Western and pro-U.S., headed by Pres. Mikheil Saakashvili, a graduate of two American universities. Saakashvili has pursued an aggressive course of entry into every European institution that would acept him, and backed by the U.S., has agitated for eventual membership in NATO.

Saakashvili, after his elecion as president in 2004, also institgated a series of domestic structural and domestic reforms. He sucessfully reasserted Georgian authority in the southwestern autonomous republic of Ajaria on the Turkish border. He euchred out former Soviet Russian military bases, with the last remaining one in the port of Batumi handed over to Georgia in 2007.

But his effort to reincorporate breakaway South Ossetia, a northern ethnically divergent area with close ties to North Ossetia over the Russian border, was blocked by Moscow. Open Russian support to South Ossetia — and a second northern ethnic enclave of Abkhazia on the Black Sea — has perpetuated their attempted secession and now probably given them a majority of quick-fix Russian nationals with the flight and expulsion of Georgian ethnics as refugees.

Georgian forces – which have been receiving some training and arms from the U.S. – entered South Ossetia Aug. 7, attempting to bring the region under Tiblis’ control. As this is written, Russian military forces have retaliated by entering South Ossetia and launched a series of airstrikes against Georgian forces and civilian targets [some possibly outside the direct conflict areas] which Tiblis has answered with a declaration of a state of war. But Saakashvili has called for a cease-fire.

The outcome of this conflict, however, could decide much larger issues than the fate of the Ossetians, the Abkhazians – or even the Georgians.

Moscow’s troubled southern border with Georgia is a continuing cancer for the Russian military and its politicians. Chechnya, an important oil refining and transport area, remains a quagmire for Russian forces after two wars over more than a decade. The area’s guerrilla forces have fallen more and more into the hands of Islamists with international terrorist ties due to Moscow’s grim but failed tactics of scorched earth and counteterror. Furthermore, the guerrillas operations have spread to Ingushetia and other neighboring Muslim populations on the Gerogian border. The Chechen issue is a source of international human rights agitation against the Russian government and growing disaffection among the Russian Federation’s 25 million Muslims [growing at a much faster rate than the rapidly declinning Slav population.]

Moscow’s repeated claims of infiltration of men and arms to these areas from Georgia seem to be less important in the Russians’ lack of success with Tiblis exercising more control over most of its territory outside those under Moscow sponsorship. And now the Russians are more likely to base their South Ossetian argument largely on protecting their nationals in the area. Moscow may well also see backing the Orthodox Ossetians as a counter to the growing antagonism of the Caucuses Muslims.

For the U.S., an independent and viable Georgian state, small as it is, has become a crucial building bloc in the effort by Washington – and more faint-heartedly by the Europeans – to preserve the inegrity of the whole bevy of states which escaped Russian and Soviet colonialism with the fall of the Soviet Union. That is why, for example, Poland has taken up the Georgian cause in European Union councils, much to the chagrin of the larger EU powers which are hoping again to finesse any difficulties with the Russians, with their growing energy hold on European industry and comfort.

All around the Russian periphery, there are territorial disputes between Moscow and the successor independent states. They plague relationships – even with the look-alike autocracy of Belarus. Whether it is the rights and privileges of the Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia or the secessionist strip of Transdniester on the border of Romanian-speaking Moldavia which once sought union with Bucharest, and or recent Moscow claims on Ukraine’s Crimean port of old Soviet fleet port of Sevastopol — these remants of the Soviet empire are tripwires. Moscow sees them as either nostagic elements of Soviet past glory, or with more aggressive Russian strategists, the levers to pry open old forms of domination.

Georgia is a particularly case in point because of Washington’s creation of an “energy corridor” from the still largely unexploited oil and gas reserves of Central Asia to world markets. It would permit those producers to reach markets in Europe and the world without using the decrepit but strategically powerful pipelines transiting Russia.

Having failed as much as his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in making the major reforms of Soviet government and social institutions [including the military], now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is relying on energy blackmail alone for a supposed return to days of Soviet glory. Whether it was the corrupt deal to build a pipeline – now seemingly in tatters for various reasons – with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder – on the Baltic Sea oceanbed to Germany around Poland and the Baltic states or the state-owned Gasprom buying up distribution companies in Europe, Moscow exploits its only weapon in its own new version of the Cold War.

The U.S. answer, in part, has been to help create against the advice of most in the industry itself, a pipeline from Azerbaijan which passes through Georgia on its way to the Mediterranean and world markets. The project is already moving a million bpd of oil and a growing amount of gas, one percent of the world market. [A mysterious fire on the Turkish section of pipeline in mid-July could have been the work of anti-Turkish PKK terrorists, who have begun to take an increasingly anti-American line, and who might be exploiting old Kurdish ties to the Soviets.]

Expansion and access to huge reserves, eventually, of gas and oil in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and gas in Turkmenistan, as well as Azerbaijan’s Caspian Basin holdings, could significantly lead to the total fungible world energy supply. And it would help break the power of Moscow’s increasing chokehold on Europe.

Putin has chosen this moment, with the world’s attention focused on Beijing’s Olympics and Chinese issues, to demonstrate Russian “power” in a smaller geopolitical theater. A lame-duck American administration, still bogged down in the remnants of a war in Iraq and a growing crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is not in a position to do more than make the right noises about the Georgian crisis. It is also hampered by the uncertainty of the political campaign. Already Democratic Party presumptive candidate for president Barack Obama has taken a softer line than Republican presumtive candidate John McCain against Russian maneuvers in Georgia. Again, European resolve is being tested – not least German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s NATO credentials and French President Nikolas Sarkozy’s new pro-American French stance – at a time when Washington has other fish to fry.

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