obviously you are new to robert kagan. he'll give you a certain perspective that would have been popular about 6 years ago.
Aren't we gifted with the assumptions.
I deliberately included that snippet about Kagan's present and past affiliations so that people could put it in whatever perspective they want. On this issue he strikes me as spot on with his assessment. It is tremendously naive for anyone to think that the Russians were on Georgian soil as part of any peacekeeping mission... I'm sure their handing out passports was part of that effor to keep the peace as well. The details as to who fired first cannot conclusively be established since there were no external observers to provide an impartial report. The Russians would not have massed troops ahead of time so as to tip their hand and betray their intentions to the West... with the circumstances being as nebulous as they are, they'd want nothing more than to claim that they were only responding to Georgian aggression... which makes absolutely no sense. Why would the Georgians attack the Russians?
Misplaced sense of bravado requires a certain suspension of logic and an embrace of conjecture in it's place. We could accept guesses or we could go to the source
Rebuke of a President, in the Boom of Artillery August 12, 2008
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
GORI, Georgia — All but under the thumb of the Russian Army, this city might seem an unlikely place for a news conference by the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York lawyer who became one of the youngest presidents in the world when he was elected here in 2004 at the age of 36.
But there he was on Monday, stepping out of a black S.U.V. onto a sidewalk strewn with broken glass.
Wearing slacks and a flak jacket looped over his strapping shoulders, he took a few steps toward the backdrop he had in mind — bombed apartment buildings — when a Russian jet flew overhead. It hissed faintly as it moved quickly over the city.
His guards pointed at the sky. They yelled “Air! Air!” and a moment of panic ensued. They shoved the president hard backward toward a wall covered in grape vines, then onto the ground, and held a flak jacket over him.
Some piled on top, to shield him from possible shrapnel. A moment later, he was back in the S.U.V. and speeding down an alleyway here, in a city that he announced on Georgian television had been overrun by the Russian Army — though the Russians, and other Georgian officials, denied it.
For a moment, though, hunkered on the ground, Mr. Saakashvili looked totally vulnerable in what may be a defining image of his presidency.
In this war, which began last Thursday with an artillery exchange between Georgia’s army and separatists in South Ossetia backed by Russia, Russia has wielded all the hard power. Mr. Saakashvili has fought back with soft power: the polished international image, the fluent English, repeated, eloquent appeals on cable news for Western support and, frequently, near histrionic claims about Russian intentions and actions in the conflict.
Educated at Columbia Law School in the mid-1990s, Mr. Saakashvili has carefully cultivated Western reporters and is well known in Washington, where he is close to conservative politicians. When Senator John McCain visited Georgia in 2006, the president took him out on the Black Sea.
Mr. Saakashvili belongs to a generation of young men and women from the former Soviet Union who were educated in the West but returned to their home countries. He proudly professes to hold “American values.”
His personal, fierce allegiance to the United States, where he became a successful lawyer, has helped make Georgia, a onetime backwater, into a pivotal country in the politics of the post-Soviet era.
Mr. Saakashvili was also a strong supporter of the American-led war in Iraq, contributing the second largest contingent of troops this year after only Britain, before the soldiers returned to Georgia this week to join the fighting.
The Bush administration, with its broad assurances of support for Georgia, has come in for strong criticism in Georgia for having emboldened Mr. Saakashvili to challenge Russia.
But Mr. Saakashvili has resisted the notion that he was somehow taken in. Asked in a recent interview on CNN if he believed Georgia could win against Russia militarily, Mr. Saakashvili said, “I am not crazy.” But many here say he is headstrong and reckless, endangering the country’s security by rashly ordering an attack on the Russian enclave of South Ossetia on the eve of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and badly underestimating Russia’s determination to respond militarily. The critics say he has shown he is willing to put his ambition ahead of the best interests of his people.
Bold gambles and dramatic gestures have always been part of Mr. Saakashvili’s political arsenal, however, and no small amount of his appeal. So, too, has been his inclination to torment his increasingly powerful neighbor.
When he won the Georgian presidency in 2003, he did so by pushing aside Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a former Soviet apparatchik, following street protests known as the Rose Revolution. It was the first of a series of pro-Western movements that spread to Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and alarmed the Kremlin.
He then infuriated Moscow by running for re-election on a platform of absorbing the breakaway areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He managed to win back two smaller enclaves, and then set his sights on the bigger prize of South Ossetia.
On the occasions when the Kremlin appeared to strike back — shutting off gas supplies in the dead of winter, sending drones and fighter planes into Georgian air space, for example — he complained loudly, taking his case to the international news media.
At home in Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili’s bold touch was never far away, either.
He set out to eradicate corruption in the traffic police by firing all the traffic policemen. Those who wanted to rejoin had to reapply. Here, in a small way, he won.
He also purged the civil service and universities of older, Soviet-trained workers. His administration is perhaps the youngest anywhere, a cadre of 30somethings, many of whom, like the president, are Western-educated.
Not surprisingly, many cashiered civil servants were among the protesters last fall who took to the streets of Tbilisi in a large, sustained demonstration. Mr. Saakashvili, saying the protesters were inspired by a Russian-linked politician bent on staging a coup, responded by disbanding the marchers with riot police.
Now, Mr. Saakashvili calls the war a struggle not between Georgia and Russia, but between Russia and expanding Western influence in the states of the former Soviet Union.
Asked his views of Russia’s motives in the war in an interview on Saturday, he said: “They want to get rid of any democratic movement in this part of their neighborhood. That’s it. Period.”
SourceYet another perspective:
Putin Calls Shots to Salve Old Wounds August 12, 2008
By ELLEN BARRY
MOSCOW — Vladimir V. Putin, who came to office brooding over the wounds of a humiliated Russia, this week offered proof of its resurgence. So far, the West has been unable to check his thrust into Georgia. He is making decisions that could redraw the map of the Caucasus in Russia’s favor — or destroy relationships with Western powers that Russia once sought as strategic partners.
If there were any doubts, the last week has confirmed that Mr. Putin, who became prime minister this spring after eight years as president, is running Russia, not his successor, President Dmitri A. Medvedev. And Mr. Putin is at last able to find relief from the insults that Russia endured after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Georgia, in a way, is suffering for all that happened to Russia in the last 20 years,” said Alexander Rahr, a leading German foreign-policy scholar and a biographer of Mr. Putin’s.
With Russian troops poised on two fronts in Georgia, speculation abounds on what Mr. Putin really wants to do. He faces a range of options.
Russia could settle for annexing the enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — something its forces have largely accomplished. Kremlin authorities have also spoken of bringing Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, to a war crimes tribunal for what they say were attacks on civilians in Tskhinvali last week.
A further push might permanently disable the Georgian military. The most extreme option would be occupying Georgia, a country with a population of 4.4 million and a centuries-old distrust of Russia, where Western nations have long planned to run an important oil pipeline.
But while the West may see an aggressive Russia, Mr. Putin feels embattled and encircled, said Sergei Markov, the director of Moscow’s Institute for Political Studies, who has close relationships with officials in the Kremlin.
“Russia is in an extremely dangerous situation,” trapped between the obligation to protect Russian citizens and the risk of escalating into “a new cold war” with the United States, Dr. Markov said.
“Washington and the administration are playing an extremely dirty game,” he said. “They will show Putin as an occupier even if Putin is doing nothing.”
Mr. Putin and his surrogates have forcefully made the case that Russia does not plan to occupy Georgia but is acting only to defend its citizens.
In recent days, Mr. Putin has appeared on television with his sleeves rolled up, mingling with refugees on the border with South Ossetia — the very picture of a man of action.
By contrast, Mr. Medvedev is shown sitting at his desk in Moscow, giving ceremonial orders to the minister of defense.
“He is playing the game which is designed by Putin,” Mr. Rahr, who serves on the German Council on Foreign Relations, said of the new president.
Yulia L. Latynina, a frequent critic of Mr. Putin’s government, noted with amusement that on the eve of the conflict in Georgia, when President Bush and Mr. Putin were deep in conversation in Beijing at the start of the Olympics, Mr. Medvedev was taking a cruise on the Volga River.
“Now he can cruise the Volga for all the remaining years, or can go right to the Bahamas,” she wrote in Daily Magazine, a Russian Web site. “I must admit that for the first time in my life I felt admiration for the skill with which Vladimir Putin maintains his power.”
In 2000, Mr. Putin was elected president of a shaken, uncertain country. Selling off state companies to private investors had led to immense flight of capital. The economy was in shambles. But the bitterest pill of all was NATO’s expansion into Russia’s former sphere of influence.
Nothing highlighted this loss of face as much as Kosovo, where NATO helped an ethnic Albanian population wrest independence from Serbia. Russia has few allies closer than Serbia, and the 78-day American-led bombing campaign in 1999 seemed to drive home the message that a once-great power was impotent.
Mr. Putin was determined to change that. First, he reasserted state control over Russia’s natural resources companies, installing loyalists to run businesses like Yukos and punishing oligarchs who challenged his power.
With Russia then reshaped as a petro-state, flush with money from oil and natural gas, Mr. Putin has sent blunt messages to its neighbors: The flow of cheap energy can be turned off as well as on. Two years ago, after what was called the Orange Revolution swept West-friendly leaders to power in Ukraine, Russia briefly cut off the country’s flow of natural gas, sending waves of anxiety across Europe.
Now, with Russia’s swift progress in Georgia, Mr. Putin has asserted Russia’s might as a military force. Russian troops entered Senaki in western Georgia on Monday, and Moscow acknowledged for the first time that its forces had entered Georgian territory.
“I would say you have a situation in which the Russians have come to the red line,” said Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
In describing Mr. Putin, people often use the word “icy.” After the lurching presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin offered himself as a man in consummate control of his impulses. He does not drink liquor; he skips lunch; his great indulgence is judo.
Early in his presidency, he charmed his Western counterparts, coming across as an articulate and cosmopolitan leader. But there were always topics that brought out a different side of him.
As Mr. Yeltsin’s tough-guy prime minister, he made a stir by threatening Chechen guerrillas with gutter language: “If we catch them in the toilet, we’ll rub them out in the outhouse.”
In 2002, when a French reporter faulted Russia for killing innocent civilians in Chechnya, he suggested that if the reporter were so sympathetic to Muslims, he could arrange to have him circumcised. “I will recommend to conduct the operation so that nothing on you will grow again,” he said.
The prelude to the events in Georgia reveals Mr. Putin as both a careful actor and a visceral one. In the spring, when Western nations lined up to recognize a newly independent Kosovo, Mr. Putin answered by formally recognizing the two breakaway enclaves in Georgia.
Over the course of the last decade, the Russian government issued passports to virtually all residents of South Ossetia, a step that would become the justification for moving troops over the Georgian border. And last year, Russia suspended its compliance with the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which, among other things, required that it withdraw troops from Georgia and Moldova.
But emotions have flared up, sometimes unpredictably. Mr. Putin reserves a particular dislike for Mr. Saakashvili.
In April, when Mr. Putin decided to establish legal connections with the governments of the breakaway regions, the Georgian president called him and reminded him that Western leaders had made statements supporting Georgia’s position. Mr. Putin responded by telling him — in very crude terms — where he could put his statements.
“He has such a visceral attitude toward Saakashvili that that seems to drown out anything else that anyone says to him,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It may take time to work out the messages Mr. Putin has sent in the past week, but this one is clear: Russia insists on being seen as a great power. “The problem is, what kind of great power is emerging?” said Mr. Trenin, of the Carnegie Center. “Is this a great power that lives by the conventions of the world as it exists in the 21st century?”
Source