As a local activist, I don't feel the need to test the limits of my ignorance on global politics too often. Others are less cautious, and over at Iain Dale's blog, he highlights some commentary from the socialists (Lib Dem branch) in which the live conflict between Russia and Georgia is framed in 1930's metaphors as a Rhineland moment, before wisely couching his personal uncertainty in the question: "What do we do?"
The correct answer in my view is "Nothing", which is also the answer to the related question "What can we do?".
While we're waiting for more news, I'll mention briefly a report from the Daily Mail entitled "Russia sinks Georgian warship and 'bomb Tbilisi airport' as refugees flee in panic". Some grammatical issues with that sentence, but the key points are:
The Russian Defence Ministry claims to have sunk a Georgian warship which was attacking its navy ships in the Black Sea, according to Russian new agencies. [...] The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying that Georgian missile patrol boats twice tried to attack Russian ships, which fired back and sank one of the Georgian vessels.
[...] Russian bombers still appeared to be shelling a military airport at Tbilisi. Cataclysmic Russian bombing as laid waste to major towns, including Tskhinvali and Gori with around 2,000 believed dead.
I had to refer to a map to find out that Georgia even had a coastline, let alone a Navy. The ship lost may have been this one, originally built in France nearly 40 years ago, and equipped with the twenty-five year old Exocet missile.
An interesting point to note is that South Ossetia is not the only hot-spot in the area. a small* UN peace keeping force - UNOMIG - is already in theatre managing a buffer zone between Georgia and the break-away republic of Abkhazia. It will be interesting to see whether this conflict heats up as Georgian military strength is compromised or redeployed.
*[via Wikipedia] The current chief military observer is Major General Niaz Muhammad Khan Khattak from Pakistan. UNOMIG’s strength, as of 1 October 2007, stands at 133 military observers and 19 police officers.[1]
11 August, 2008 - 07:44
The Georgian motto is "strength through unity". Perhaps the Russians have the same idea. I did a bit of reading up on Georgia, courtesy of the excellent Wikipedia. The Caucasus situation seems analogous to that in the Balkans - several small countries with complex geographical and ethnic boundaries in a mountainous area, often threatened and dominated by adjacent imperial powers. Any concept of nationhood or independence in such circumstances must be far removed from anything understood by an island people like the British (except perhaps in Northern Ireland).
11 August, 2008 - 09:46
It might be a bit more complicated than sitting back, admiring the naval battles (you don't get many of them these days do you?) and "doing nothing" as James suggests. The underlying problem seems to be that the west, NATO and the UN are rather flatfooted and have no consistent policy on what to do about these small breakaway republics. On the basis that they allowed Kosovo to separate from Serbia why not South Ossetia from Georgia? Intriguingly Russia opposed Kosovan Independence, which suggests they're capable of playing a smart hand as they set about their task of addressing the balance of power in Europe. This one could run and run ...
11 August, 2008 - 11:57
When Messrs Blair and Clinton abused NATO to bomb Kosovo they paved the way for this. We were always going to reap the whirlwind from their ignorance and arrogance - or as they would have it, their "ethical foreign policy".
11 August, 2008 - 19:29
No admiration here: I was trying to highlight the force differential. The Russian military is still the second largest in the world (yes, the drop-off after #1 is high), possessing the largest Army, Navy & Air force in Asia. (see here for comparisons) Whereas the poor bastards in the Georgian Navy are stuck in the Black Sea motoring about in the Littoral Warfare equivalent of an Austin Allegro.
JMB
12 August, 2008 - 11:40
It's pushing it a bit to blame Clinton/Blair for this one.
Kosovo is relatively good example of the merits of intervention. Especially given the alternatives - James' Conservative "do nothing" foreign policy prescription was aggressively pursued by Hurd/Rifkind/Major in Bosnia and gave us Srebrenica . That's hardly a result.
The relevance of Kosovo lies purely in the ad hoc granting of its independence by the international community without giving any thought for the wider implications or how it might be used in other contexts (eg. Russia attempting to keep NATO out of its back yard)
Now where is that clever Mr Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who's supposed to know these things?
12 August, 2008 - 12:53
BB, you seem to have fallen uncharacteristically for A Campbell's unchallenged propaganda at the time of the Kosovan folly. The KLA tail observed what happened in Bosnia and well understood how to wag the NATO dog. Madeleine A may have had her own reasons in her European past for the intervention, and Clinton may have wished to divert attention from Monica. Blair may have liked the idea of playing white knight. (He certainly got a taste for it and couldn't resist doing it again in Iraq, presumably telling his junior partner that it was easy to square the media, but forgetting that this new partner was a Republican and therefore subject to very different media treatment.) We still don't know what the real reason was for the unprecedented Balkan escapade, as so many people like you swallowed the party line at the time and have never questioned it since, many even believing it was a UN crusade instead of an abuse of NATO.
The UN man on the spot advised against the "intervention", saying that if it went ahead there would be a humanitarian disaster.
So, AC: we must bomb Kosovo because some atrocities have taken place which the KLA attribute to the Serbs; 100,000 people then fled this ethical bombing and a lot more atrocities took place in the mayhem; AC: we must continue to bomb Kosovo because there is a humanitarian disaster taking place [such as did not happen initially in Iraq].
We are still left with the unresolved mess there, and the Serbs have a burning sense of grievance and injustice at the way they were treated, both in the war and in the peace. Our show trials, resting on the corrupting influence of the EU, are a disgrace. Apart from all of that, we annoyed the Russians in what we did, and they now have rather more than a leg to stand on in what they are doing in their former empire.
12 August, 2008 - 12:55
PS I agree with you, BB, about the brilliant young Miliband.
12 August, 2008 - 21:40
"The correct answer in my view is "Nothing", which is also the answer to the related question "What can we do?"."
Brilliant! Although the question "What CAN we do?" is the first one to ask, if the answer to that is 'Nothing', then we can turn our minds to more pressing problems like reducing the regulatory burden on UK plc.
12 August, 2008 - 21:42
On the topic of 'Have you seen Miliband', he looks a bit like this.
13 August, 2008 - 13:00
I haven't fallen for anything. A rational assessment of the reasons for the Kosovo conflict leads me to believe that the reasons for it (whether you agree with them or not) were humanitarian. I've mentioned to James before how much Tory thinking on foreign affairs comes to remarkably similar conclusions to the far left. Your views bear this out. Without the old "it's all about the oil" schtick to blame it all on, the left had to resort to blaming Kosovo on some vague notion of "imperialism", while you offer up some rather offbeat psychopathological causes (Madeleine A's background and some moral complex from Blair) and accusations of such cynicism from Clinton that we're into the realms of conspiracy theory. Your seeming support for shoddy little butchers like Milosevic, Mladic, Arkan and Karadzic over western liberal democracies also perfectly chimes with views you normally find on the far left ...
13 August, 2008 - 13:30
One should perhaps ask what Russia most fears from us. This would be the entry of Ukraine into NATO. Their diplomacy centres on this as much as on the central European missile shield.
Thus a hint from us that an aggressive Russian policy in Georgia could prospectively lead to a forward extension of NATO into Ukraine (or Georgia, Caucasus, or Turkey) might lead to second thoughts in Moscow.
I do not say it would. One has to see Intelligence, diplomatic reports, etc., before making a judgement.
Bear in mind that Russia is in economic discomfort. Inflation is about 12% and oil prices are falling. Oil production is not what it might be. So they have a crunch in sight.
Over Cuba in 1962, it was Kruschev who was sacked for being a little too intrepid. It could happen to Putin, if he is seen as backing down, or as an adventurist.
13 August, 2008 - 14:27
BB, I could have thrown in a few more hypothetical reasons for the Kosovan bombing. The point was to suggest that the Balkans are, and always have been, very tricky to deal with. Like Northern Ireland at its worst, only much, much nastier and more complicated. Humanitarian, arrogant, ignorant of history - whatever Blair and Clinton were, it was bound to have consequences. There is no such thing as the end of history. History continues to be horrible, and to understand that is not to like it.