Another oil war:
I’d pay attention to the Georgia / Russia if I were you guys. There’s more than you think at stake.
Quick background: When the USSR crashed in the 1990s, The Republic of Georgia broke away from Russian hegemony and once again became an independent state. The problem was that there were enclaves inside Georgia of non-Georgians who weren’t interested in being part of a Georgian state. Said boundaries were set up by Stalin a long time ago, and Stalin, a Georgian, wasn’t interested in the problems of internal minorities.
One of these was South Ossetia; the Ossetians are split between Russia and Georgia, and they’re the survivors of the ancient Alan peoples, high up in the Caucasian mountains. They feel that the Georgians want to forcibly assimilate them, and they want out of Georgia. Ditto the areas of Abkhazia and Ajaria. The present reformist government of Georgia is also very Georgia-nationalist, and has been doing a fair amount to say ‘you guys shut up and become good Georgians’, and this has led to open conflict.
The Russians have supported the minority groups for several reasons; the minorities in some cases have people on the Russian side of the border who prefer Russian rule to that of the Georgians, and the Russians don’t care for the new Georgian government, because the Georgians want to join NATO and the European Union and the West in general. This is seen as a thorn in Russia’s side vis-a-vis its ability to control the lesser states that are former parts of the USSR and that it still thinks it should have major influence and control over.
- A basic is that Russian natural gas and oil are the lifeline of most Europeans. The idea of using those as political weapons has already been brewing for a while, and the only way out of the Caspian-area fields from other former-USSR nations to the West (for European consumption), supplying 1% of the world’s oil needs and a million barrels a day to Turkey, that doesn’t go through Russia is a single pipeline through Georgia to the Black Sea.
- The Russian navy is blockading Georgian ports and the Air Force has bombed the heck out of the main oil port. They’ve also been bombing other areas far away from the disputed areas in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
- The Russian armed forces are totally stomping the Georgians. There’s only about 20,000 people in the Georgian Armed Forces, and the Russians are hitting them hard in combined arms attacks of all sorts.
- The question isn’t whether the Georgians can stand up to the Russians. They can’t. The question is what do the Russians want?
- My guess is that the Georgians should have taken the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia a long time ago, and just taken the ‘loss’ of something they really aren’t controlling anyway.
- The Russians, I think, are tired of this whole running mess on their southern border, tired of dealing with the nationalist Georgian government, and will invade and force a regime change in Georgia while the US and any other states are too busy with Afghanistan and Iraq to send any help to Georgia - or before Georgia joins the EU or NATO. The resulting regime will be a Russian puppet.
- Russia didn’t like the collapse of Serbia into multiple states; they really didn’t like the creation of Kosovo into an independent state under the aegis of NATO and the UN. This creates the puppet states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Georgia as well as Ajaria, and the Russians will run them as they see fit and control the oil pipeline as it sees fit. If the US has a problem with this, considering the wars against Iraq and Serbia, the US can kiss Putin’s rear.
- Yes, US political stuff fits into this. Georgia’s politicians thought they would get US support against Russia in very concrete terms and were dumb enough to push a nationalist agenda against the minorities. Their big support in Washington DC came from lobbyists - the exact same ones that are running John McCain’s campaign. The lobbyists gave the idiots in Georgia the idea that Bush and McCain and the USA would support them no matter what...taking their money and knowing full well, of course, that the USA has no significant support to give.
- And the McCain campaign is now making up a story that Obama is pro-Russian. This, of course, adds to the line of ‘Obama is anti-American’ and the idea of Obama being for those awful Rooskies - why, he’s really a Commie Red, no? Of course, it’s all crap, but that’s not something that stops the McCain folks.
A Russian major-league pol said:
“Georgia could have used the years of Saakashvili’s presidency in different ways - to build up the economy, to develop the infrastructure, to solve social issues both in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the whole state. Instead, the Georgian leadership with president Saakashvili undertook consistent steps to increase its military budget from $US 30 million to $US 1 billion - Georgia was preparing for a military action.”
And to the late, great Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who was also a believer in Russian nationalism and power:
“The trouble is not that the USSR broke up - that was inevitable. The real trouble, and a tangle for a long time to come, is that the breakup occurred mechanically along false Leninist borders, usurping from us entire Russian provinces. In several days, we lost 25 million ethnic Russians - 18 percent of our entire nation - and the government could not scrape up the courage even to take note of this dreadful event, a colossal historic defeat for Russia, and to declare its political disagreement with it.”
That part has always been in Russian minds. And they would love to ante their oil and gas power and remaining military power to make people fear them. Again.