Take, for example, Saakashvili’s piece from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The title, “Unprovoked Onslaught,” stands as an incredible bit of exaggeration… Throughout the piece, Saakashvili effectively paints Georgia as a helpless victim of a Russia scared to death of liberalization on its southern border and a loyal friend of the West who is not receiving the help his small nation needs to consolidate and extend the accomplishments made in the past few
years.
Well played.
That is our own Nathan Hamm, writing of Saakashvili’s desperate push to elevate Georgia in the American consciousness… in 2006. Nathan struck an appropriately neutral tone, saying that Georgia certainly has gripes, and the conflict bears much closer attention to keep it from exploding into open war (hah!), but that Georgia is also not an innocent lamb being dragged to the slaughterhouse. Even better:
Saakashvili knows that Russia has almost everything going in its favor in the disputes over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow need only keep the conflicts frozen to eventually come out on top, and the only way for Georgia to move the ball forward is to escalate tensions. Saakashvili has done a fairly good job of escalating tensions when much of the West is looking the other
direction, and, as is the case in his WSJ opinion article, painting Russia as entirely to blame. (And Russia has played right into his hands this time around with its over-the-top reactions.) Despite the seriousness of this latest flare-up though, Georgia has not really gotten the West to bite and is, quite intelligently, working overtime on getting its case out and not neglecting trying to fire up public opinion against Russia.
Remember, he wrote this about twenty months ago. Now we see where it’s gone—exactly where we assumed it would. Meanwhile, Steve LeVine takes a look at how this conflict will change the energy balance of the Caucasus:
At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.
But after the mauling Georgia got, “any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead,” says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a
brokerage in Greenwich, Conn. The risk of building a pipeline through countries vulnerable to the wrath of Russia is just too high.
Indeed, Russia made a very pointed point of dropping a single bomb near BTC but not destroying it. As I learned from Dune, one of my favorite books, the power to destroy a thing gives one control of it. Russia now has control of the Caucasus, and it won’t have to invade anyone else to maintain that control. Meanwhile, Russia is busy exaggerating the claims of genocide. I think this warrants a continued open mind about the particulars of the conflict—we’re still collecting all the facts, and rushing to early snap-judgments will not help matters.
Source: registan.net >>>
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