Mahbubani on western hypocrisy, etc.

Longtime JWN readers will know that I’m quite a fan of Kishore Mahbubani, an extremely smart strategic thinker who was Singapore’s ambassador to the UN until a couple of years ago. Yesterday, he had a great piece of commentary in the Financial Times on “the meaning of the Georgian war.” (HT to Bernhard of MoA.)
Mahbubani writes:

    Sometimes small events can portend great changes. The Georgian fiasco may be one such event. It heralds the end of the post cold-war era. But it does not mark the return of any new cold war. It marks an even bigger return: the return of history.
    The post cold-war era began on a note of western triumphalism, symbolised by Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History. The title was audacious but it captured the western zeitgeist. History had ended with the triumph of western civilisation. The rest of the world had no choice but to capitulate to the advance of the west.
    In Georgia, Russia has loudly declared that it will no longer capitulate to the west. After two decades of humiliation Russia has decided to snap back. Before long, other forces will do the same. As a result of its overwhelming power, the west has intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant countries. They are no longer dormant, especially in Asia.
    Indeed, most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia. America would not tolerate Russia intruding into its geopolitical sphere in Latin America. Hence Latin Americans see American double standards clearly. So do all the Muslim commentaries that note that the US invaded Iraq illegally, too. Neither India nor China is moved to protest against Russia. It shows how isolated is the western view on Georgia: that the world should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia. In reality, most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be greater.
    It is therefore critical for the west to learn the right lessons from Georgia. It needs to think strategically about the limited options it has…

The fourth paragraph there describes something that “westerners” crucially need to be able to understand. Westerners do not monopolize either humankind’s smarts, or its sensibilities, or its way(s) of looking at the world. Indeed they (we) are in a distinct minority, and badly need to understand that.
Especially given that one of our bedrock values in the world is that of the equality of all human persons…. Well, it still is, isn’t it?
Mahbubani has a lot more there, too. Including this:

    In the US, leading neo-conservative thinkers see China as their primary contradiction. Yet they also support Israel with a passion, without realising this stance is a geopolitical gift to China. It guarantees the US faces a hostile Islamic universe, distracting it from focusing on China. There is no doubt China was the bigger winner of 9/11. It has stabilised its neighbourhood, while the US has been distracted.
    Western thinkers must decide where the real long-term challenge is.* If it is the Islamic world, the US should stop intruding into Russia’s geopolitical space and work out a long-term engagement with China. If it is China, the US must win over Russia and the Islamic world and resolve the Israel-Palestine issue. This will enable Islamic governments to work more closely with the west in the battle against al-Qaeda.
    The biggest paradox facing the west is that it is at last possible to create a safer world order. The number of countries wanting to become “responsible stakeholders” has never been higher. Most, including China and India, want to work with the US and the west. But the absence of a long-term coherent western strategy towards the world and the inability to make geopolitical compromises are the biggest obstacles to a stable world order. Western leaders say the world is becoming a more dangerous place, yet few admit that their flawed thinking is bringing this about. Georgia illustrates the results of a lack of strategic thinking.

* I guess my only criticism of this analysis is over Mahbubani’s argument that “Western thinkers must decide where the real long-term challenge is,” with the choice presented being a strictly dyadic one between it being “the Islamic world” and it being China. Actually, I don’t think the choice is anywhere near as dyadic as this implies (and anyway, the policies that he prescribes for either choice are broadly similar.)
But here’s the deeper problem: he is still in the mindset at that point of arguing that the “west” needs to identify a main enemy– or as he says, a “real long-term challenge”– that is another state or bloc of states. But then, in the last paragraph he goes against that thinking– certainly, with respect to China– when he underlines that China, like India, wants to work with the US and west. And here’s an addendum to that: so do most governments in “the Islamic world”, and so, indeed do most Muslims… provided this cooperation with the US and the west is on a basis of mutual respect and fair cooperation.
Neither China nor the vast majority of members of “the Islamic world” want to overthrow any western governments and dominate their countries, which is what, for a period of time, the Soviet Union aspired to do.
So where is the real “long-term challenge” that the west faces? I believe it is the challenge, for Americans, of starting to see themselves (ourselves) as co-equal members of the world community rather than standard-bearers in some kind of existential, life-or-death contest with enemy states that requires us to bear the huge costs of maintaining our bloated military and using it to “keep order” right around the world: 360 degrees, 24/7.
And then, oh yes, there are plenty of other, very serious long-term challenges that we and the rest of the world community all face together. Challenges like dealing with:

  • climate change;
  • global inequality and the suffering of our brothers and sisters in the low-income world;
  • weapons proliferation;
  • the occurrence of conflict-driven atrocities;
  • the anti-humane violence perpetrated by Islamist extremists and others…

So please, while we’re facing serious challenges like those ones, let’s not, as “westerners,” go round the world looking for whole blocs of people and governments to make war on, as well.
Kishore Mahbubani was quite right there, in his last paragraph, when he wrote that few western leaders were prepared to admit that their own flawed thinking has been making the world a more dangerous place. But I think the greatest flaw in the thinking of most westerners has been this need to organize the world, and mobilize one’s own resources and activities, around the definition of a state or bloc of states as our enemies, to be faced down or toppled with our military power. It is that tendency that has made the world more dangerous for everyone– ourselves, along with many, many others. Now, we need to adopt the much more realistic stance of aligning ourselves at the side of the world’s other six billion people, facing the challenges that confront all of us, together.

Condi in Baghdad: YES on a timetable (aspirational)

AP tells us that at a joint appearance with Iraqi “Foreign Minister” Hoshyar Zebari in Baghdad today, Condi Rice agreed that, regarding a troop withdrawal plan,

    We have agreed that some goals, some aspirational timetables for how that might unfold, are well worth having…

You can bet that with the US/NATO deployment in Afghanistan now in serious trouble and NATO itself in the most severe crisis it’s seen in its 59 years of existence, there will be “timetables” for a US pullout from Iraq.
A linguistic note: An “aspirational timetable” is still not the same as a fixed timetable. But I would say it signals something noticeably more definitive than the “aspirational time horizon” that was the administration’s previous position on this. (With a horizon, the more you try to get close to it the more fades further away from you… )

More on NATO, etc.

The statement issued by the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting yesterday was considerably more sensible than the belligerent, jingoistic rantings that make up much (though thankfully, a decreasing amount) of the commentary in the US MSM. At several points it goes to lengths not to express any strongly anti-Russian judgments. For example, “We deplore all loss of life, civilian casualties, and damage to civilian infrastructure that has resulted from the conflict.” It notably does not make any promise of either immediate or more delayed military aid to Georgia, saying only that NATO has agreed to measures “intended to assist Georgia, a valued and long-standing Partner of NATO, to assess the damage caused by the military action and to help restore critical services necessary for normal public life and economic activity.”
And finally, it seems to go quite a long way toward respecting the leadership in negotiating the political tasks that lie ahead regarding the Georgia crisis to… none other than “the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Alexander Stubb.”
This strikes me as extremely realistic, sensible, and helpful. The more they do that, the better. (You can read more on OSCE here.)
The NATO people well understand that the US- and Israeli-trained Georgian armed forces got trounced in the recent fighting. (The US had been training the Georgians mainly to do checkpoint duty in Iraq… And one of the Israeli private companies training the Georgians was headed by Gen. Gal Hirsh, drummed out of the IDF after the troops he’d trained showed in 2006 that they couldn’t do anything effective other than checkpoint duty in the West Bank. H’mmm.)
AP’s Matti Friedman had this account of some interviews he did with US trainers in Tbilisi, who were fairly disparaging about the skills of their trainees. Interestingly, Friedman interviewed these trainers last weekend while they were “on standby at the Sheraton Hotel, unarmed and in civilian clothes.”
From the beginning of the Georgia-Russia conflict, the US military took great pains to keep its own troops far away from any situation in which they might be seen as being involved in the fighting. I also saw a report that, though the US flew the 2,000 Georgians who had been in Iraq back to their country, they disarmed them before they did so, so as not to be accused by the Russians of pumping any more arms into the country during the war.
Despite its sometimes accusatory rhetoric, the actual actions on the ground taken by the Bush administration have been prudent and wise, and I am happy to give them credit for this.
It strikes me there is a huge contrast between the prudence displayed in those actions and the belligerence expressed so many times by McCain.
Journalists and others should ask McCain: “What, actually, would you have done differently? Would you have put US troops into this fight? How would you have supported them there?”
It strikes me that McCain’s rhetoric– including his repeated expressions of strong and completely uncritical support for Pres. Saakashvili– have been irresponsible and incendiary.
Why is Barack Obama not calling him on this?
Why is Obama not putting forward a strong and compelling alternative to the belligerent and dangerous approach espoused by McCain? Surely he can see that the US public doesn’t want another war? (Especially one that it has zero hope of winning.)
I just want to come back, for a moment, to the question of what it is that NATO used to do, back when it still it had a rationale. What it did was deter the Russians from sending their massive ground troops into the industrial heartlands of Western Europe.
NATO succeeded precisely because it succeeded at deterring. It didn’t succeed at fighting, because thanks to the success of the deterrence it never had to fight.
Georgia is not an industrial heartland of Europe. On August 8, Georgia was not a member of NATO. If it had been, NATO’s crisis would have been even sharper and more immediate– because even if it had been a “member” of NATO, very few NATO members would have come to its aid.
But member of NATO or not, the war in Georgia has shown that the old western doctrine of “deterrence” failed on that occasion.
One caveat, though: This was deterrence still at the strictly sub-nuclear level. (And that in itself is also significant. What utility at all do nuclear weapons have today?)
Deterrence, it strikes me, is closely linked to a desire (or, a readiness) to achieve significant strategic goals through “shock and awe.” Yet the whole world has now seen that even “shock and awe” didn’t bring Bush a strategic victory in Iraq, just as it didn’t bring Olmert one in Lebanon.
Military power just ain’t as useful in “foreign” encounters as it used to be. (To be discussed later, not now: the extent to which Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Georgia are actually “foreign” for Russia. Military power did prove “useful” for Russia there; and lack of a working, indigenous national-defense strategy proved disastrous for Saakashvili…)
As of now, Georgia’s military forces have been just about stripped of all their capabilities. I’m sure the Russians have been fascinated to look at all the computers, drone-control systems, naval electronics, and other military hardware and software they’ve been carting home from all the Georgian military bases they’ve over-run in the past ten days.
A question: How many sensitive US or NATO systems have been compromised as a result?
Another, more important question: What will be the outcome of the negotiations that will doubtless occur over the Georgians’ ability to rebuild their military, given that it would be starting, as of now, from somewhere around ground zero?
… Okay, I realize this is a slightly rambly post, but I’m too tired to divide it up better or do any other form of high-level editing on it. I just want to note here, finally, that The National Interest, the uber-Realist mag published by the Nixon Center, has a couple of very good pieces on Georgia/Russia on its website today.
This one is a very well-informed ‘Realist’ take on the whole Russia question, by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.
They write:

    in reality, today’s Russia is not a resurgent imperial power. In the post-Cold War period, it was Washington, not Moscow, which started the game of acting outside the United Nations Security Council to pursue coercive regime change in problem states and redraw the borders of nominally sovereign countries. In Russian eyes, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, including arresting and presiding over the execution of its deposed President, undermined Washington’s standing to criticize others for taking military action in response to perceived threats. And American unilateralism in the Balkans, along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.

And this article is an interview with Shalva Natelashvili, the founder and chairman of the Georgian Labor Party, and a veteran leader of the Georgian opposition.
Two key excerpts from that:

    Q: Why did President Saakashvili order Tskhinvali to be taken by force?
    A: He probably had hopes of receiving some kind of external support. Someone must have lied to him to give him these false hopes—whether it was from the West, South, or North is uncertain. Someone was deceiving him.
    Also, Saakashvili had real delusions of grandeur, and saw himself as the Napoleon of Asia, which is a psychological disorder for an individual and a tragedy for Georgia.
    Third, he wanted to speed up the entry of Georgia into NATO, but this is a mistake: the issue of the Abkhazia region would still remain unresolved.
    Fourth, he’s committed crimes against democracy—he established a one-party dictatorship in Georgia in all the elections held in Georgia during his reign (local, presidential, parliamentary), closed the free flow of information, seized TV companies and dozens of innocents died.

And this:

    Q: How can Georgia and Russia overcome these tensions and live peacefully?
    A: Russia and Georgia are fated to live peacefully together. Russia should recognize Georgian territorial integrity, and Georgia shouldn’t conduct a strident anti-Russia policy.
    Georgia is a very small country located at the very center of Eurasia. Its geographical location is supposed to make it the unifying point of the Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern civilizations. That is the function of Georgia—it can solve its problems and those of the rest of the world as well.

That sounds realistic and hopeful. I hope we can all hear a lot more from this guy.

NATO’s crisis

… Hint: It isn’t just the organization’s massively long over-reach in Afghanistan, as revealed in the ever-mounting casualties among western forces and the continuing, dire crises of insecurity and pauperization through which the Afghan people are living (or not), now, nearly seven whole years after the US invaded their country…
It’s also the whole range of questions raised about NATO’s purpose and usefulness by the whole Georgia crisis.
Many militarists here in the US have been arguing vociferously (a) that the existing NATO members should now ‘fast-track’ Georgia’s entry into the alliance and (b) that Russia would have been completely deterred from the counter-attack it launched against Georgia if Georgia had already been a member of NATO.
Excuse me?
Imagine if Georgia had already been in NATO on August 7. That was the day Pres. Saakashvili broke an existing ceasefire when he launched a rocket attack against targets in South Ossetia who included Russian peacekeepers serving there under the auspices of OSCE.
Russia’s military response to that can certainly be described as disproportionate (though not nearly as much so as, say, Israel’s assault against Lebanon in 2006.) But it was not completely unjustified… One could also describe it, in the circumstances that prevailed in the region over preceding weeks, as predictable with quite a high level of certitude.
So if Georgia was already a NATO member, would NATO as a whole have come to Saak’s rescue once the Russians counter-attacked? Or failing NATO-as-a-whole, would individual NATO members have sent in enough troops to push the Russians back out and “punish” them?
(NATO’s ground-rules of “all for one and one for all” would indicate that it should be NATO as a whole that responds… But we could look at the other option, too.)
In a word, no.
And that’s the real crisis of NATO. It doesn’t actually seem to have any point any more. And that is probably what has gotten “front-line” states like Poland and the Czech Republic into such a tizzy right now.
A good part of the reason that NATO wouldn’t have come to Saak’s aid even if Georgia were already in it is that it couldn’t have done so effectively because of the deep bleeding of its lifeblood and capabilities over Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military is the absolutely necessary backbone of NATO. But now, US ground forces are stretched to break-point. US military airlift, sealift, global recon capabilities, and long-distance attack platforms are all just about fully tied up trying to keep the Iraq and Afghanistan missions going.
And no, no-one in the US– as far as I know– was about to launch a nuclear first strike against Russia over Ossetia.
Nor should we forget that the political infrastructure of NATO– the web of relationships among its members– was rent in two by Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and remains in very bad shape because of the demands placed by Bush regarding Afghanistan…
So the Bush administration’s decisions to (a) invade Iraq and (b) frog-march as many NATO members as possible into the mission in Afghanistan have caused NATO’s crisis to manifest itself with particular sharpness right now.
But there are deeper problems, too… Mainly those connected with the phenomena of mission creep and/or mission dissolution. (Often linked phenomena in troubled organizations, I note.)
NATO was founded in 1949. Its founding goal– as its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, once famously said– was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” (I got the attribution on that great quote from Wikipedia, whose entry on NATO is pretty good.)
So what do you do, if you’re a western leader, in 1991-93, when first the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union itself collapses?
Do you hold a victory party, dissolve NATO, and then work with Russia and all the former WP/Soviet states to build a new, much better set of relationships among all these countries? (You might call that the Abraham Lincoln approach.)
You could have used OSCE as the main framework for this, given its significant history and its broad, trans-Eurasian and even transatlantic reach.
Or there were those, back in the early 1990s, who proposed inviting Russia (and presumably all the other formerly -Soviet countries) to join NATO.
Andrew Meier reminds us that that idea aroused significant interest from Boris Yeltsin, who in 1991 described it as his “long-term political aim.” Also, that even Vladimir Putin, during his first few days in office in March 2000, still expressed support for that aim.
But Presidents GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush have never been able to get their heads around that idea of Russian integration into the transatlantic system on the “equal” basis that both Yeltsin and Putin insisted on. Indeed, they and the vast majority of the US political elite seem, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, to have stuck rigidly to the idea that the idea of NATO is “to keep the Russians out” of the system.
But given that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had both collapsed, there then arose the tricky political problem of how do you “sell” NATO, and the non-trivial costs involved in keeping the old war-horse going, to its sometimes skeptical non-US members? The watchword in some US circles at the time was that NATO had to either go “out of area”– that is, take on tasks outside its traditional Central European (counter-Russian) area– or it would have to go “out of business.”
As we can see from a glance at the map, Afghanistan is massively “out of area”!
So that’s one of the big differences between NATO and OSCE. NATO’s goal was to keep Russia out while OSCE’s goal, since the very beginning, has been to keep the Russians and their allies well integrated within the transatlantic/Eurasian part of the world system.
The other difference– which is huge, and fundamental– is that NATO is overwhelmingly a military alliance. Military action is its entire raison d’etre. (Hence, the need for ‘enemies’, and the shock with which most NATO leaders view any suspicion that Russia might be included in the membership… After all, if Russia is not an ‘enemy’, what is NATO for? Ah, good question.)
OSCE, by contrast, seeks to use numerous networks of relationships in the non-military sphere to try to keep its 56 member nations together, to build up support for common norms and for the institutions that embody and further them. One key one being the norm of finding nonviolent ways to resolve thorny political problems..
Hence, the role that OSCE’s been playing for the past 17 years– including inside Georgia– in midwifing and monitoring ceasefire and demilitarization agreements among and sometimes within its member states.
So here’s my proposal. Let’s declare the Cold War over? Let’s disband NATO. And rather than looking at ways to further encircle, ‘contain’, or push back Russia, let’s work hard at strengthening the norm of nonviolent conflict resolution across the board, including by seeking stronger roles for the UN, at the global level, and for OSCE, in the areas that it covers.
One good first step: OSCE’s announcement yesterday that it will be increasing the number of unarmed military monitoring officers it has inside Georgia by “up to 100.” Twenty of these monitors should be deployed “immediately.”

And another thing about Finland

In this blog post last Thursday I wrote a bit about the prospects of a “Finland-like” outcome for Georgia– and several of us then had a pretty good quick discussion of the question on the comments board there.
I just want to expand on a reference I made there to the neutral-but-engaged status of Finland having positioned it to be the host of “important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference.”
The Helsinki Conference gave rise to the very important Helsinki Treaty, which enshrined human rights as a topic of completely legitimate concern in east-west diplomacy in Europe and the whole of the then-Soviet Union. (Which thereby set the stage for the rise of the numerous nonviolent social movements that played such a transformative role in the politics of heartland Europe.)
The Helsinki Treaty also mandated the establishment of a continuing body for oversight and coordination, known as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE.)
Since its founding OSCE has frequently played a crucial role– midwifing the emergence of new democracies and mediating many of the conflicts that emerged during that process. Sadly it was not able to prevent the eruption of large-scale fighting in former Yugoslavia, but in many of the other, mainly ethnic, conflicts that emerged during the Soviet implosion, OSCE was there with technical help and principles-based mediation services, able to play a role in reducing tensions across the whole of the landmass covered by NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the former Soviet Union.
Including during the Russia-Georgia tensions that arose in the early 1990s– after which OSCE ceasefire monitors continued to be deployed right up to and through the outbreak of the present crisis.. Which is why OSCE is poised right now to play a major role in implementing, and probably also helping to negotiate, the longer term settlement that’s required between Russia and Georgia, once the existing ceasefire is being adequately observed.
That longer term settlement may (or may not) include provisions for demilitarization and foreign-affairs neutrality in Georgia that put it into something very like the situation vis-a-vis Russia that in the post-WW2 decades Finland was in with regard to the old Soviet Union. We’re already hearing dire warnings among warmongers in the west against the dangers of “Finlandization.”
But as I tried to argue Thursday, Finlandization really is not the worst option, at all, for Georgia’s people. It ended up working out fairly well for most Finns, in a world that is certainly far short of an ideal one.
And it worked out pretty well for the rest of the world, too.
Watch for the role that OSCE will be playing in the weeks ahead.

Where in the world is… Ban Ki-Moon?

The Georgian-Russian war is the most significant watershed in world politics since George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As I noted last Sunday, it signals clearly for all the world to see that (1) The global power-projection capabilities of the highly over-militarized ‘west’ are currently stretched ways beyond what can be sustained, and (2) Russia, which was largely absent as a significant actor on the world stage since 1991 (or before), is now most certainly ‘back’ in the role of a substantial big power.
At such a watershed point, we should be more relieved than ever that over the past 63 years the world’s governments have created and sustained an entire network of globe-circling institutions, led by the United Nations, that are primed and ready to help ease all the tensions that a shift like the present one represents– and to do so in a sustainable, rights-strengthening way that radically decreases the possibility of further, possibly much more serious, war.
So where the heck has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon been over the past eight days?
He should have been at the forefront of all the international diplomatic efforts aimed at ending the Russia-Georgia conflict and crafting a longterm settlement in that region that can also strengthen the UN’s essential norms of nonviolence, human equality, and the support of human flourishing and human security.
Where has he been?
Ireland’s RTE News tells us this morning– eight days into the crisis– that Ban “will interrupt his holiday to hold private talks with the ambassadors of the US, Russia and Georgia on how to formalise the ceasefire deal.”
So until now, he’s just been continuing his holiday?
On Thursday, the UN issued a press release assuring us that Ban (presumably speaking from his vacation hideaway) “has expressed deep concern at the humanitarian impact of recent fighting on the civilian population in Georgia.”
Not good enough. Anyone and everyone has issued a bland, humanitariany statement like that. But the UN is about a whole lot more than “humanitarian aid” and “humanitarian concern.”
Yesterday (Friday), Reuters reported that Ban,

    has so far been unable to contact Russian President Dmitry Medvedev by telephone [presumably from same vacation hideaway] to discuss the crisis in Georgia, a U.N. spokesman said on Friday.
    Ban has spoken to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who called him on Thursday.

But Ban’s spokesperson assured Reuters that “Ban is expected to meet Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, possibly on Saturday.”
Or possibly not, huh? Can’t cut that holiday too short, after all…
Here’s why this is important. For the past 15 years, the US has come increasingly to act like the “power of last resort” and the delegated enforcer for all portions of the earth’s surface except for some those limited portions of the global landmass that lie inside the national borders of Russia and China. No international body ever delegated these powers to the United States, whose citizens comprise under five percent of the world’s people. It just came to assume them, helped in many instances by a never-stable, ever-evolving cast of “allies,” like those roped in for occupation duty in Iraq (a group that dwindled significantly over time), or in Afghanistan (mainly, a subset of members of a strictly-military alliance that was formed for very different purposes 60 years ago.)
Now, the US-led “west” is hopelessly over-extended, with grave consequences for the peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The military-based, “US leadership” model of global governance that it represents cannot be sustained. We all need to take a few very deep breaths, reflect deeply on the consequences of war-waging and militarism wherever they have been practiced, and start a new worldwide conversation on how to do things a whole lot better going forward.
That’s where the United Nations comes in.
Yes, it’s imperfect. But we really don’t have time to start a wholly new organization from the ground up. And meanwhile, the UN has a number of very important attributes:

    1. Its inclusivity,
    2. Its founding principles of anti-militarism and human equality,
    3. The many instruments it has developed to help bring about the nonviolent resolution of even thorny conflicts among nations, and
    4. The wide expertise its network of specialized agencies has acquired in all aspects of building the human foundations of security in today’s highly interdependent, irreversibly globalized era.

That is why all the world’s citizens– but most especially, the people living inside the self-referential bubble of the US system— now need to see some robust and sure-footed UN leadership in the diplomacy of resolving the Ossetian crisis. It will demonstrate to us all that there is a better way than reliance on US unilateralism and militarism as a way of ordering the world– and it will help strengthen the UN’s own capabilities and credibility, as well.
But all this past week, Ban Ki-Moon has been Missing in Action.
Ban, we need you! Come home!
Instead of seeing him leading the immediate diplomacy, what have we seen? More of the same, of “western” leaders just stepping in as if it is entirely their right to dominate all international diplomacy, on every issue, in every part of the world.
Excuse me? Who gave them that right?
Why should it be Condoleezza Rice who positions herself as “final arbiter” in the dispute between Georgia and Russia? Why would she or anyone imagine that– after all the considerable aid the Bush administration has given to Georgia in recent years– Washington has the neutrality that would be required for anyone credibly and effectively to play that role?
(Oh, maybe the whole sorry history of US domination of the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking over the past 20 years got Americans into the idea that being deeply partisan is not incompatible with being a neutral peacemaker? Well, it hasn’t worked too well there, either, has it?)
In the present crisis, the two US allies Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel played a significant role as Condi’s scouts and wingmen in the diplomacy…
And between them, they have secured something of a ceasefire on paper at this date, which is a valuable first step.
But a more durable, longer term settlement between the Russians and Georgians is certainly still required. Personally, I hope it would be based on a wide and credibly monitored demilitarization of the two ‘contested territories’ within Georgia, and also of wide swathes of ‘inner Georgia’ itself, as well as of areas of Russian territory that border Georgia.
But whatever the content of the longer term settlement, to arrive at it will require strong and clear UN leadership of the diplomacy. Hard to see how Bush or either of his successors would have either the international credibility or the means to do that.
It will take tough talking– with the leaders of both Georgia and Russia. And it will take promulgation of a paradigm of what “peacemaking” is about that is very different from the US paradigm of “arm this side, then arm that side, then if they fight each other get in there with our own armies to rack up the violence level even higher…”
The west can’t sustain that approach any more. We are in desperate need of a new, much more cooperative and human-based approach to peacemaking, too. Help us out here, Ban Ki-Moon. Please?
But where the heck are you today?

Russian military assessment: New arms race?

Moscow Times today gives us a fascinating article by Simon Saradzhyan analyzing the Russian military’s performance in Georgia in some detail.
Of note there, that among the 171 Russian troops wounded was the general who was leading the entire Russian operation in Georgia, Lieut.-Gen.Anatoly Khrulev, commander of the 58th Army. Saradzhyan reports that 70 Russian troops were killed.
Saradzhyan and the Moscow-based experts whom he quotes give generally high marks to the Georgians for their high level of training and the success they had had integrating hi-tech western systems like drones (UAVs) into their operations. Saradzhyan writes bluntly that

    while the conflict has demonstrated that Russia can and will coerce its post-Soviet neighbors with force if the West doesn’t intervene, it has exposed the technical backwardness of its military.
    The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military.

One of his sources, retired army commando Anatoly Tsyganok, said the timing of the original Georgian offensive against South Ossetia was well chosen, since Putin was in Beijing and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, were on vacation. Indeed, Saradzhyan wrote that former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had said the outbreak of the conflict represented “a major intelligence failure.” (That, contra the judgment expressed by Stratfor’s chief, that the whole affair had been a very cleverly spring trap laid by the Russians, which Saradzhyan also quotes.)
Saradzhyan describes the original Georgian offensive and the response of the Russian forces thus:

    Only 2,500 Ossetian fighters and less than 600 Russian peacekeepers were on hand to counter 7,500 Georgian troops backed by dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, according to estimates by Russian generals and experts. Tbilisi’s plan appears to have been to conquer Tskhinvali in 24 hours and then advance to South Ossetia’s border with Russia in the next 24 hours to present Russia with a fait accompli.
    The blitzkrieg plan, however, faltered despite the personnel and technical superiority of Georgian troops, highlighting errors in the Georgians’ political and military planning.
    … The Kremlin timed its response perfectly, because sending troops earlier would have drawn immediate accusations of a disproportionate response, while stalling further could have allowed the Georgian troops to seize Tskhinvali and the rest of South Ossetia, said [Konstantin Makiyenko, the deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.] The Russian troops established control over much of South Ossetia by Aug. 10 and then started to make inroads into Georgia proper, destroying military facilities.

The Russians also, almost immediately, opened a second front in Abkhazia.
Saradzhyan writes:

    The Georgian attack failed because President Mikheil Saakashvili and the rest of Georgia’s leadership miscalculated the speed of Russia’s intervention, defense analysts said. Tbilisi also underestimated the South Ossetian paramilitary’s determination to resist the conquest and overestimated the Georgian forces’ resolve to fight in the face of fierce resistance. The Georgian military also failed to take advantage of the fact that Russian reinforcements had to arrive via the Roksky Tunnel and mountain passes, which are easier to block than roads on flat terrain.
    Another reason the Georgians lost was because the Russian military used knowledge gleaned from past conflicts, including the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its own reconquest of Chechnya. “Russia has learned the lessons taught by NATO in Yugoslavia, immediately initiating a bombing campaign against Georgia’s air bases and other military facilities,” Tsyganok said.

The above account is consistent with either the intel failure or the “cunningly laid trap” narrative. If the latter, the trap may well have involved luring Saak into launching his attack by demonstrably having both Putin and Medvedev be away from their desks together. It woukd also indicate a willingness to take a non-trivial number of casualties– among both civilians and troops– at the beginning of the war. But hey, compared with the levels of casualties the Red Army took during the “Great Patriotic War”, these casualties could well be seen by Russia’s leaders as extremely low indeed.
In the account of the war so far that Saradzhyan provides, the Russian ground forces and elite and commando forces performed well, but serious deficiencies were revealed in the performance of both the air force and military intelligence.
He writes:

    Nogovitsyn said the Georgians shot down four Russian warplanes. The Georgians said that Russia had lost 19 planes as of Monday.
    The Air Force’s losses, including a long-range Tu-22, and helplessness in the face of air strikes by Georgian Su-25 attack planes and artillery fire on Tskhinvali as late as Monday should set off alarm bells in Russia, Makiyenko said. “The failure to quickly suppress the Georgian air defense despite rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve air supremacy despite a lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force shows the poor condition of the Russian Air Force,” he said.
    The loss of Russian planes might have come because of the poor training of pilots, who log only a fraction of the hundreds of flight hours that their NATO counterparts do annually, Netkachev wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Monday.
    Russian intelligence bears responsibility too for failing to provide up-to-date information on the capabilities of the Georgian air defense and air force, Netkachev said. As recently as three years ago, Georgia had no pilots capable of flying the Israeli-upgraded Su-25 planes, he said, adding that Russian commanders should have known that Ukraine had supplied Buk and Osa air-defense systems to Georgia and might have trained its operators.
    “One general lesson that the Russian side should learn is that it is possible to build a capable, well-trained force in just three to four years, as Saakashvili did,” Makiyenko said.

It is pretty evident that Russia’s very own military-industrial complex will try to use the results of this war to argue for a much more sizeable chunk of the country’s budget than it has been getting.
Saradzhyan writes:

    Only 20 percent of conventional weaponry operated by the armed forces can be described as modern, according to Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, an independent military weekly. Yet the government and military have disproportionately skewed financing toward the strategic nuclear forces, which they see as the main deterrent, at the expense of conventional forces.
    The lack of modern, quality equipment became evident when several tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down as army reinforcements moved from Russia to South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. Overall, however, the Ground Forces operated better than the Air Force, accomplishing their mission of routing the Georgian units, he said.
    “The main lesson that Russia should draw from this conflict is that we need to urgently upgrade our Air Force, with a comprehensive general reform to follow,” he said.

Just one quick last note here. The Soviet military used to produce– and publish in Russian– some pretty objective and useful after-action assessments of various military engagements in which they or they allies had been involved. (Though they would usually attribute any negative judgments they expressed about the quality of Soviet arms or operations to those ever-handy “foreign sources.”) Today’s Moscow Times is not an “official” newspaper in the same sense the old Soviet papers were… But I’m pretty sure that many decisionmakers in Moscow would read an article like this one in it with considerable interest. I wonder whether the fact that it’s in English, and therefore not likely to be read by the great mass of Russian citizens, gives them more freedom to write about potentially touchy subjects like military deficiencies?
But anyway, from what Saradzhyan writes, it seems pretty clear that the Georgian war will have given a boost to the military-industrial complex’s lobbying power in Moscow– just as it almost certainly has done in Washington.
We do still have time to stop this new arms race in the field of hi-tech “conventional” weapons before it gets any further underway… But we need to start the worldwide campaign to do this now, rather than just letting all these arms manufacturers and their hired hands drive the agenda while the rest of us aren’t looking.
There are many better ways to resolve thorny conflicts than through war and killing. Let’s all try to be smart enough to understand that, and to start a huge global shift toward outlawing war and strengthening the nonviolent means of conflict resolution.

Yglesias nails McCain

Think Progress and Matt Yglesias’s blog, now also over at the Center for American Progress, are emerging as two of the most thought-provoking blogs on foreign policy decisionmaking in Washington.
Today, Yglesias absolutely nails the irresponsible and dangerously escalatory nature of John McCain’s rhetoric over the Georgia crisis.
He notes that McCain has described the Georgia-Russia war the “first serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War” and joins with those (including Think Progress’s Satyam) who have pointed out that, erm, just a few other crises much graver than that in Georgia have occurred since 1991.
Matt adds:

    beyond McCain’s seemingly poor memory, the interesting thing is the confusion in terms of high-level concepts. It was just a little while ago that McCain was giving speeches about how “the threat of radical Islamic terrorism” is “transcendent challenge of our time.” Now Russia seems to be the transcendent challenge. Which is the problem with an approach to world affairs characterized by a near-constant hysteria about threat levels and a pathological inability to set priorities.

Holed it in one, Matt.
I particularly liked the “pathological” there, though perhaps “pathogenic” would also be a good description. Because this “gadfly” quality of McCain’s, that apparently does prevent him from setting clear priorities in global affairs, would cause considerable harm to Americans and the other 95% of the world’s people if he got elected President… Especially when allied to his longstanding tendency to see enormous threats wherever he looks. (We could call this latter condition “phobiaphilia.” Of course, the entire military-industrial-‘contractor’ complex depends on it.)

Sarkozy’s ceasefire, Georgia’s future

The NYT was able to use its people’s good relations with the Georgian government to get hold of the text of the ceasefire agreement that Sarkozy got the Russians to agree to at 2 a.m. Wednesday. Here it is, in PDF, with the French original bearing handwritten notes representing the Georgian side’s requests for further revisions, which according to this accompanying story by Andrew Kramer Russia had not accepted..
According to Kramer, when Sarkozy made his first stop in Tbilisi earlier this week he and the Georgians agreed to the first four four of the six points listed there. He then went to Moscow, where Putin (and Medvedev?) insisted on adding the last two points. So the six-point version without the phrases added in parentheses is what Moscow agreed to. And then, during Wednesday, yesterday, the Russians used the provision in Point 5 that says, “While awaiting an international mechanism, Russian peacekeeping forces will implement additional security measures” to advance further into Georgia, go into the military bases the Georgian forces had abandoned there, to confiscate all the weapons etc.
In the interest of assuring “security”, of course.
Since some of these bases had been built to strict NATO specifications, I imagine the Russians were also extremely interested in many of the things they found there, including computers, security systems, and so on.
But this provision about being able to implement “additional security measures” seems to give them very wide latitude to rush around wherever they please inside Georgia and to suppress any forces there that might oppose them.
(The Russians take as given that all the troops they have in Georgia are “peacekeeping forces.” Just another really horrible example– like the west’s much favored “humanitarian intervention”, or the idea of US troops as “liberators” in Iraq– of the misuse of eirenic language to euphemize what are obviously extremely coercive actions backed up by brute force.)
My reading of Moscow’s decisionmakers is that they most likely won’t, in fact, use the permission that Point Five might, by some readings, appear to give them to take over Tbilisi or other parts of Georgia. But they almost certainly will use their presence inside Georgia to extract the very best political terms they can from Tbilisi.
Charles Krauthammer, in his belligerent column today, warned against the “Finlandization” that he identified as being Russia’s goal in Georgia.
“Finlandization” is the term to describe the arrangement that tiny Finland worked out with Stalin’s Russia in 1947. It gave the Finns broad autonomy (or, a form of bounded “sovereignty”) over its conduct of the entire gamut of domestic affairs, while the Finns agreed that Moscow could exercise a virtual veto over its conduct of foreign affairs.
Wikipedia tells us that,

    After the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, Finland succeeded in retaining democracy and parliamentarism, despite the heavy political pressure on Finland’s foreign and internal affairs by the Soviet Union. Finland’s foreign relations were guided by the doctrine formulated by Juho Kusti Paasikivi, emphasizing the necessity to maintain a good and trusting relationship with the Soviet Union. To this end, Finland signed an Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union in April 1948. Under this pact, Finland was obliged to resist armed attacks by “Germany or its allies” against Finland, or against the Soviet Union through Finland, and, if necessary, ask for Soviet military aid to do so. At the same time, the agreement recognized Finland’s desire to remain outside great power conflicts, allowing the country to adopt a policy of neutrality during the Cold War. As a consequence, Finland did not participate in the Marshall Plan, and took neutral positions on Soviet overseas initiatives. By keeping very cool relations to NATO, and to western military powers in general, Finland could fend off Soviet preludes for affiliation to the Warsaw Pact…

In US public discourse, Finlandization is generally seen as a form of humiliating appeasement, and something to be avoided at even a very high cost. (Strange, then, that these same westerners have consistently been urging the Palestinians to accept a deal from Israel that gives them terms considerably less favorable than what Finland won from Moscow?)
Within Finland itself, the period of Finlandization is viewed with considerably more nuance than in the US. I’d like to suggest that in Georgia, some arrangement like the one that gave Finns such broad rights of local self-governance– under which they kept their country out of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, used the revenues that they saved by not having to maintain large armies to make considerable advances in their socioeconomic and educational status, and used their neutral diplomatic status to host important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference– might be considerably better for the country’s people(s) than a descent into further war?
… Anyway, the diplomacy over these issues has still only barely started. First, let’s hope the ceasefire holds.