ARTICLE: Miscalculation, missed signals and overreaching on Georgia (iht.com)

By Helene Cooper
Published: August 18, 2008



WASHINGTON: Five months ago, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, long a darling of this city's diplomatic dinner party circuit, came to town to push for America to muscle his tiny country of four million into NATO.
On Capitol Hill, at the State Department and at the Pentagon, Saakashvili, brash and hyperkinetic, urged the West not to appease Russia by rejecting his country's NATO ambitions.

At the White House, President George W. Bush bantered with the Georgian president about his prowess as a dancer. Laura Bush, the first lady, took Saakashvili's wife to lunch. Bush promised him to push hard for Georgia's acceptance into NATO.

Three weeks later, Bush went to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, on the invitation of Vladimir Putin, then the president of Russia. There, he received a message: Putin warned that the push to offer Ukraine and Georgia membership in NATO was crossing Russia's "red lines," according to an administration official close to the talks.

Afterward, Bush said of Putin, "He's been very truthful, and to me, that's the only way you can find common ground." It was one of many moments when the United States seemed to have missed - or gambled it could manage - the depth of Russia's anger and the resolve of the Georgian president to provoke the Russians.

The story of how a 16-year, low-grade conflict over who should rule two small mountainous regions in the Caucasus erupted into the most serious post-Cold War showdown between the United States and Russia is one of miscalculation, missed signals and overreaching, according to interviews with diplomats and senior officials in the United States, the European Union, Russia and Georgia. In many cases, the officials would speak only on condition of anonymity.
It is also the story of how both Democrats and Republicans have misread Russia's determination to dominate its traditional sphere of influence.



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