In early August 2008, Russian officials ordered air strikes against Georgia, a republic directly south of it and bordered by Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and sent tanks and troops into South Ossetia, a region in northern Georgia that had claimed its independence from the central government in Tbilisi. The Russians explained that peacekeeping units they had deployed in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, had been shelled by Georgian forces, and they were rushing in to defend their troops. Not surprisingly, the American political and media establishment did not accept the Russian explanation. The U.S. and NATO condemned the attacks and demanded a cease-fire, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for a complete Russian withdrawal. [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/world/europe/09georgia.html?scp=10&sq=c.j.%20chivers%20russia%20and%20georgia%20war&st=cse ].
Much of the media focused on charges of Russian expansionism [as in Chechnya] and the personal enmity between Vladimir Putin, the ex-president of Russia still wielding great power behind the scenes, and President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, who had been strongly supported by the Bush administration, puffed up by the U.S. press, and was conducting a political and propaganda campaign to be admitted into NATO. [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/europe/11ticktock.html?scp=7&sq=c.j.%20chivers%20russia%20and%20georgia%20war&st=cse ].
The two presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, joined the hallelujah chorus, both offering strong denunciations of Russia and support for Georgia during the Presidential debates on 26 September and 7 October 2008. Obama called for a reevaluation of “our entire Russian approach . . . because a resurgent and very aggressive Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region.” He went on: “their actions in Georgia were unacceptable. They were unwarranted” and he called for their withdrawal from South Ossetia. The U.S., he insisted, had to “explain to the Russians that you cannot be a 21st-century superpower, or power, and act like a 20th-century dictatorship.”
McCain outdid Obama, calling him naive for suggesting that both sides show restraint. “He doesn’t understand that Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia. And Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government.” Mocking President Bush’s claim that he looked into Putin’s soul, McCain went on, “I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters, a ‘K,’ a ‘G,’ and a ‘B.’ And their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior.”
Obama, not to be outdone, came back by agreeing with McCain on the need to stand tough against Russia. “I immediately said that this was illegal and objectionable. And, absolutely, I wanted a cessation of the violence, because it put an enormous strain on Georgia, and that’s why I was the first to say that we have to rebuild the Georgian economy and called for a billion dollars that has now gone in to help them rebuild.” [http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/transcripts/first-presidential-debate.html; http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/transcripts/second-presidential-debate.html].
Throughout the rest of the campaign, then, both candidates took a tough line on Russia and announced their support for Georgia and Saakashvili. Just a few days after the election, however, the worm turned. Based on newly-released accounts from independent military observers and confirmed by western diplomats, the story of Russian aggression against an innocent Georgia could not be sustained. Georgian forces, the observers concluded, had attacked the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on 7 August, at least 24 hours before the Russian show of force, with artillery and rocket fire that was indiscriminate, hitting civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed neutral monitors who were associated with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has overseen the conflict between Georgia and Russia since the 1990s. [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/world/europe/07georgia.html?fta=y].
Not surprisingly, with the original narrative no longer valid, the politicians and media more or less quit talking about Russia and Georgia, since it did not fit into the “aggressive Russia on the march” narrative that they had established.
This spring, however, the Georgians have reappeared, and not as innocent victims, but as angry crowds wanting to oust their own government. “Tens of thousands” of Georgians poured into the streets in early April to demand Saakashvili’s resignation, calling him a tyrant, blasting him for mishandling the August attacks with Russia, and exerting authoritarian control over the media and judiciary and other political and social institutions. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/world/europe/10georgia.html?_r=1&hp ; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/europe/11georgia.html?scp=1&sq=protests%20in%20georgia&st=cse]. His political rivals even mocked him by releasing photos of him with his American masseuse, “Dr. Dot,” (who also counts The Rolling Stones, Jay-Z, Ice-T, and Bruce Willis among her clients, and bites them as part of her treatment.] [http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/a-president-his-masseuse-and-her-blog/?scp=1&sq=dr.%20dot&st=cse].
Setting aside the renewal of cold war villiany and salacious details of massage therapy (”I don’t shag my clients – I didn’t even bite him,” Dr. Dot did explain), there was, once more not surprisingly, an important element of the story that the politicians and media never once mentioned . . . publicly at least.
Oil!
The guns of August [2008 version] were not fired without provocation or reason. As Michael Klare, who has given this subject precise and penetrating attention for years, has described it, while the Soviet Union was still around and in control of what are now independent republics like Georgia, oil was not an issue. But with the disintegration of the Communist states of Europe in the early 1990s, many of those new states began seeking western customers for their oil and natural gas. Getting western companies interested was easy, but exporting the finished product was difficult. The Caspian Sea borders Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan, and is landlocked, so oil and gas would have to be transported via pipeline, and the Russians controlled the pipeline capacity of the region. Ergo, President Bill Clinton coordinated the construction of the BTC Pipeline [Baku, Azerbaijan to Tbilisi, Georgia to Ceyhan, Turkey]. The BTC, which started operating in 2006, went through some potentially explosive areas, such as Chechnya, and Georgia’s breakaway provinces of South Ossetia, and Abkhazia. To protect the pipeline, Clinton and Bush provided the Georgians with hundreds of millions in military aid [it became the biggest recipient of aid among former Soviet republics] and lobbied for their entry into NATO. [http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5462].
In May 2006, in one of the more strident, and ironic, statements on oil and Russia, Vice-President Dick Cheney accused the Russians of blackmailing and intimidating its neighbors on energy policy, of using its vast oil and gas reserves to bully its neighbors. “Russia has a choice to make,” Cheney warned. “No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolise transportation.” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/05/usa.oil].
Cheney’s rhetoric, and hypocrisy, aside, his observations about the Russians were not without some merit. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev [who had been the chair of Gazprom, the state gas industry] did in fact use both enticements and coercion with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to build new pipelines through Russia to Europe. In turn, Europeans, who don’t want to be dependent upon Russia for energy transport, have begun talking about building their own routes for oil and gas shipments (to be called “Nabucco” after the opera by Verdi). [http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174971/michael_klare_the_bush_administration_checkmated_in_georgia].
Within this context, Saakashvili was to be essentially America’s client and protect the BTC pipeline, but he had bigger ambitions; hence, the incursions and meddling into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Surely, the aid, signals and rhetoric out of Washington, and from the presidential candidates, did not tamper Saakashvili’s grander ambitions. And so the “war” came.
Six months later, the Georgian army has been routed, the Russians are within shooting range of the BTC and other pipelines, and the Russians have recognized Ossetian and Abkhazian independence. While the U.S. and others warn Russia that it may be excluded from international meetings like the G-8, the Bush, and now Obama, administrations, really have no effective response to the Russian energy power-play.
The United States, still putting on the airs of cold war triumphalism, is worse off in the Caucasus than it had been just a year ago. The limits of power-so obvious in Afghanistan and Iraq-were invisible to the Bush posse, and it took a political-economic drubbing.
America’s dismal standing in the world, and the negative feelings and even hatred it engenders in the Middle East especially, ought to have been a fire bell about the need for a new, and alternative, energy policy. If the U.S. approach to Russia and Georgia are any indication, and I’m pretty sure they are, the previous administration learned nothing, other than to rely on oil and force.
Obama has promised a real change, a sincere pursuit of new forms of energy and a more diplomatic approach to potentially dangerous countries. If he can pull it off, we may see improvements down the road. If not, we might be talking about “two, three, many Iraqs.”
Tags: Georgia, Oil, Pipelines, Russia
Bob Buzzanco
Professor, Department of History, University of Houston; Ph.D. from The Ohio State University; Author and editor of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy; recipient of Bernath Book Prize [1996] and Bernath Lecture Prize [1999]. buzz@uh.edu; http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/buzzanco.htm