T

he Bear is back.  The Georgian village of Perevi on the western border of South Ossetia was for one brief day once again under Georgian control – as it should be – until earlier today, when hundreds of Russian soldiers occupied it.  Says AFP:

Interior ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said from 500 to 600 Russian soldiers moved into Perevi early Saturday in what he described as a “military operation” involving paratroopers, helicopters and armoured vehicles.

Georgia and EU monitors had announced Friday that Russian forces were withdrawing from Perevi, a mainly ethnic Georgian village of about 1,100 people on the western border of South Ossetia, which had been under Russian control since a five-day war in August.

Georgian police had moved into the village on Friday after Russian forces withdrew. About 20 Russian soldiers returned late Friday and Georgian police were forced out when the large contingent of troops arrived, Utiashvili said.

“They presented Georgian police with an ultimatum: get out or we will shoot,” he said.

The Russians have refused the requests of EU ambassadors in the region to visit Perevi, and the EU has called the Russians provocation a breech of the EU-negotiated ceasefire and demanded called on the Russians to pull back to the South Ossetia border.

Interesting confrontation, eh?  The EU – which as you recall is also negotiating with the even more trouble-making Iranian regime – has made a major commitment here, brokering a cease-fire, monitoring it, and calling on Russia to pay attention to their calls to play by the rules, saying the old Bear’s actions are “unacceptable under all relevant instruments of international law.”

So far, no word from Moscow.  It’s winter and their gas pipeline is keeping Europe toasty, so they’ll take their time deciding what to do about the self-emasculated pipsqueaksfrom Western Europe.

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ere are some excerpts from reports posted on the Human Rights Watch Web site:

Human Rights Watch researchers have uncovered evidence that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring dozens, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called upon Russia to immediately stop using cluster bombs, weapons so dangerous to civilians that more than 100 nations have agreed to ban their use. …

Human Rights Watch said Russian aircraft dropped RBK-250 cluster bombs, each containing 30 PTAB 2.5M submunitions, on the town of Ruisi in the Kareli district of Georgia on August 12, 2008. Three civilians were killed and five wounded in the attack. On the same day, a cluster strike in the center of the town of Gori killed at least eight civilians and injured dozens, Human Rights Watch said. Dutch journalist Stan Storimans was among the dead. Israeli journalist Zadok Yehezkeli was seriously wounded and evacuated to Israel for treatment after surgery in Tbilisi. An armored vehicle from the Reuters news agency was perforated with shrapnel from the attack. (source)

And:

When Human Rights Watch entered Tskhinvali on August 13, the city was largely deserted. Human Rights Watch researchers saw numerous apartment buildings and houses damaged by shelling. Some of them had been hit by rockets most likely fired from Grad launchers, weapons that should not be used in areas populated by civilians, as they cannot be directed at only military targets and are therefore inherently indiscriminate. Also, Human Rights Watch saw several buildings that bore traces of heavy ammunition as if fired from tanks at close range. There was some evidence of firing being directed into basements, locations where civilians frequently choose as a place of shelter. (source)

Where are the howls of outrage from the American left, who are so deeply offended whenever one of our precisely targeted bombs goes off target and despite all our care, some civilians are killed?

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J

ohn McCain is enjoying his foreign policy superiority over a confused and halting Barack Obama this week, but he’s in serious danger of overplaying his Georgia card and should back off until he gets his mouth right.

The biggest risk of too aggressive a stand against Russia is that a war-weary American electorate will fear McCain will drag them into another conflict, while the doves of peace that dreamily circle around the haloed head of Obama signal peace, brothers and sisters. Yet McCain’s speeches yesterday, replicated in today’s WSJ op/ed, look too much like a scattering of the doves. Are we in fact all Georgians, as McCain says? Or do we wish this little nowhere rough-edged democracy would just leave us alone? Quite a lot the latter; a bit of a stretch on the former.

McCain needs to be careful here, vetting his comments so they appear deeply knowledgeable on foreign policy, tough enough to stand up to trouble, but wise enough to read the truth in every situation he faces. The lead of his op/ed totally blew that image out:

For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call.

This most unfortunate sentence got an immediate drubbing down from the Left. Yglesias is as good as any for this illustration:

We all recall, of course, John McCain’s outrage when the United States violated this rule back in 2003.

Rule: Don’t hand-feed laughers to the left. Words are important, and here the important words “against democratic nations” are missing. Iraq was the disposition of a tyrant who was killing his people after years of international diplomatic efforts to bring about peaceful change; Georgia was a crushing military attack against a (weak and flawed) democracy carried out as a surprise without so much as a head fake to the diplomats. But McCain ineptly let the left focus on this canard instead of getting to the meat of the issue: How do the candidates respond to international crises?

Later in the op/ed he did articulate the thought correctly:

The world has learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked. (emphasis added)

McCain may be a maverick, but he still needs a message deck that tames the maverick enough so he doesn’t throw away his strength now or cause international incidents later, should he win in November. The conservative blogs are full of praise for McCain on all things Georgian. I started there, but I’m afraid McCain is playing his Georgia card more worrisomely with each passing day.

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I

n case you missed this little nuance of Putin’s land grab, here’s Jonah Goldberg from today’s LA Times:

Moreover, Russian bombs reportedly targeted the Baku- Tbilisi- Ceyhan pipeline, which runs through Georgia on its way to the Mediterranean — the only oil pipeline in Central Asia not under Russian control. Russia is tightening its chokehold on oil and gas at precisely the moment energy costs have become the paramount domestic issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Where is the leftist outrage? Where are the shouts of “Putin-Hitler!” (or “Putin-Stalin!” for that matter … oh, right … the Left never was much down on Stalin)?

Goldberg’s piece is about politics more than pipelines and is worthy of a complete read, as it shows how poorly Obama performed at a 3 a.m. moment,and how well John McCain did:

During Obama’s make-believe presidency, we’ve heard about bold action, about the courage to talk to dictators. When faced with a real “3 a.m. moment,” Obama — who boasts about 200 foreign policy advisors, broken into 10 subgroups — proclaims, “I’m going to get some shave ice.”

Now, of course, this is a bit unfair in that Obama had planned his no doubt well-deserved vacation for a very long time. But presidential vacations are always well planned — and often interrupted.

Indeed, President Bush’s jaunt to the Olympics as a “sports fan” should also have been cut short the moment tanks started rolling over a country he’d proclaimed a “beacon of liberty” during his visit there in 2005. By Monday, both Bush and Obama were playing catch-up to Sen. John McCain, who seemed to have grasped the gravity from the get-go and whose support for Georgia is long-standing. He took the lead from the outset, demanding on Friday morning an emergency meeting of NATO and Western aid to the fledgling democracy.

The domestic lessons learned from Russia’s actions appear much easier to read than the foreign policy lessons.

hat-tip: Jim

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I

t is, in the end, all Bush’s fault.

Isn’t it always? 9/11, Iraq, gas prices, and now the Russian invasion of Georgia, to the Bush-hating left, there is a common cause for all this, and its middle initial is W. Here’s the position, as espoused by Fred Kaplan in Slate:

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

As always, there’s no effort to look at the other side. What would have happened if we hadn’t been friendly to Georgia? If we hadn’t offered military training and accepted their involvement in Iraq? If we hadn’t pushed to expand NATO to the former Russian republics slave states? My hunch: Putin’s KGB-based Russia would have attacked Georgia one way or the other.

But to the Left, the position is to see a crisis, dredge up a one-dimensional recitation of Bush policies and blame all the evil on Bush. And from that base assumption, everything the Bush administration does must be just as evil. More Kaplan:

Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly called Saakashvili on Sunday to assure him that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” We should all be interested to know what answer he is preparing or whether he was just dangling the Georgians on another few inches of string. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security Council, “This is completely unacceptable and crosses a line.” Talk like that demands action. What’s the plan, and how does he hope to get the Security Council—on which Russia has veto power—to approve it?

Again, what is the alternative? Would Kaplan prefer Cheney call Saakashvili and tell him, “Tough luck. We’re OK with Putin sending tanks into free democracies?” Is Khalilzad supposed to tell the UN no line was crossed when Russian troops poured over the borderline? That lifts appeasement to the level of acceptance and support and no American president, not even Jimmy Carter, has ever taken such a position.

Of course Russia must answer for its aggression because of course they crossed the line. Kaplan is right that there is no military solution; heck, the military options (short of nuclear holocaust) were gone as soon as Russian air strikes started because getting a military force into Georgia is a logistical nightmare – but not as bad as the idea of fighting Russian troops on the edge of the Russian nation.

Like many of us, when it comes to Georgia, I’ve gone a vaguely supportive, lightly educated follower of Saakashvili’s democratic revolution to a fairly well read interested party, but I’m hardly a policy wonk on the issues. With that introduction, here’s what I think:

We’re on the right side. Standing up for democracies is something we just have to do, even if they’re poorly functioning. We never supported Georgia to goad Russia; we did it to encourage more democracy in the region, including in Russia.

We should continue to push for NATO expansion. Kaplan says that if Georgia were in NATO, we’d be in a shooting war with Russia now, but that’s ridiculous. If Georgia were in NATO it’s much more likely Russian troops would not be in Georgia now. So, with the knowledge that we no longer need to or should support Europe with the sort of military actions that were anticipated when NATO was formed following WWII, we should continue expansive military alliances there, just as we promote economic alliances.

We should make Russia pay, literally, for rebuilding. They’ve got the money and if we force the issue at the U.N., they’re likely to be in the unfortunate position of having to veto the action, which would be a PR disaster for them.

We should work with nations dependent on energy from the trans-Georgia pipelines to secure broad legal protections for Georgia’s control over them, not Russia’s.

We should look to the other former Soviet vassal states and see what sort of support we can give them. Some are feeling very vulnerable today, and the creation of a united front of indignant outrage that includes these states and many, many others will send a message even to Russia.

We should not spill any blood over Georgia. Our support should be broad and deep but there’s no point in sending troops into anywhere we can’t sustain them.

Russia should be dis-invited from the G8 until they learn how to behave like a civilized nation.

We should pass quite a lot of anti-Russian legislation at the federal and state level. Public portfolios should be cleansed of any Russian filth. The Air Force tanker contract should to to Boeing because it’s the only bidder that doesn’t have partial Russian ownership. No banking or trade favors allowed.

And we should pass a law that no American president can ever again look a Russian president in the eye, see his soul and deem him trustworthy. That was, in fact, a very big mistake by George W. Bush

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W

hat’s at stake in Georgia today, as Russia seeks to secure its military advances? Let’s ask the country’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

Most obviously, the future of my country is at stake. The people of Georgia have spoken with a loud and clear voice: They see their future in Europe. Georgia is an ancient European nation, tied to Europe by culture, civilization and values. In January, three in four Georgians voted in a referendum to support membership in NATO. These aims are not negotiable; now, we are paying the price for our democratic ambitions.

Second, Russia’s future is at stake. Can a Russia that wages aggressive war on its neighbors be a partner for Europe? It is clear that Russia’s current leadership is bent on restoring a neocolonial form of control over the entire space once governed by Moscow.

Saakashvili paints a story in his WSJ op/ed today of a compromise-seeking Georgia, an aggressively expansive Russia and a Europe that cried for negotiations and diplomacy, but took no overt action. Sound familiar?

Saakashvili was kind to us because he was writing in the WSJ to American opinion leaders, but he could have included us with the Europeans. President Bush has visited Georgia and praised it as a showcase of how democracy can bloom where totalitarianism once reigned. (Of course, that vision was tainted by Saakashvili’s heavy-handed treatment of opposition in Georgia’s last election.) We’ve cast our lot with Georgia, encouraged its participation in NATO, and stood by its president. Now Georgia is turning to us … and not finding much beyond words at this early hour.

The NYT’s focus this a.m., natch, was on the sort of criticism of America Saakashvili avoided.

Georgians around Gori spoke of America plaintively, uncertainly. They were beginning to feel betrayed.

“Tell your government,” said a man named Truber, fresh from the side of the Tbilisi hospital bed where his son was being treated for combat injuries. “If you had said something stronger, we would not be in this.”

He had not slept for three days, and he was angry — at himself, at Georgia, but mainly at the United States. “If you want to help, you have to help the end,” he said.

What can we do? What should we do? It’s a question that will play itself out in our election. Today, both candidates have pretty much the same position (after Obama ratcheted up his rhetoric from his early bland mumble-mouth position – see Gateway Pundit for more).

If we take this back to the Cold War, where we fought Soviet expansionism through proxies, which candidate would be more likely to provide Georgia with arms and training? McCain, of course. If it’s to be a diplomatic war, which candidate would be more likely to be able to put together an international condemnation of Russia with sufficient teeth to influence Moscow?

Good question. Obama is the international darling so the answer should clearly be him. But would his appointments be the ones that could carry out such a task? So far, it looks like Obama foreign policy will be that of Madeline Albright, which doesn’t bode well. McCain has the pugnaciousness to bare some teeth and has been drawing on a kitchen cabinet of foreign policy pros from Kissinger to Kristol that in my opinion are much better suited for this sort of affair.

Lots of questions … but one’s already being answered: The American left is going to duck the issue. Tigerhawk did the digging:

Well, as of this morning, you can find no mention of the war on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s home page. The group is addressing many other pressing matters, but apparently not the unremitting attack on Georgia. Code Pink? Nyet. Democracy Now!, which is a left-wing media group, has lots of news about American wars on its web page but nothing about Russia or Georgia. Nothing from the comrades at Peace Action. Stop the War Coalition? What war? You can search the home pages of left-wing groups until the cows come home and not find anything on the Russo-Georgia war.

For its part, Daily Kos poses a survey question this morning. No, not about Russia and Georgia, but about how the summer weather’s been this year.

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