RUSSIA'S ATTACKS on Georgian troops, territory, and infrastructure over the weekend were brutal and unjustified. For the sake of all the people in that region of the Caucasus, and to avoid a calamitous new rift between Russia and the West, there must be an immediate cease-fire and negotiations to resolve the disputes that caused the current war. Chief among these are tangled old quarrels over the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, breakaway regions of Georgia that have received Russian protection.
But it is not enough to condemn Russia's bombing and shelling of Georgia. This was an avoidable war, one that many parties had a hand in touching off. It is a war that can have a destabilizing effect not only in the region, but also on energy supplies for Europe, and on international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told refugees from South Ossetia that Georgia had forfeited any right to rule that region after Georgian forces attacked the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, last week. In other words, the Kremlin was demanding independence for South Ossetia — something most of the population there would welcome — or virtual annexation by Russia.
Putin is making the most of an opportunity that has been presented to him. He has long resented Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's anti-Russian, pro-Western stance. He has warned against Saakashvili's ambition of gaining rapid entry into NATO for Georgia, an ambition that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have encouraged but that France and Germany deflected this spring.
It is Saakashvili — a free-market democrat, but also a hothead — who provided the opportunity Putin seized this weekend. Georgia's initial offensive last week in South Ossetia, causing nearly half the population to flee north into Russian territory, was bound to provoke a sharp response from the Kremlin. Saakashvili either misread signals from the Bush administration — which is in no position to come to Georgia's aid militarily — or he acted on his own, hoping that once the Russians intervened, Bush and Cheney would be obliged to back up their rhetoric with military action.
The Bush administration did its part to prepare the ground for this summer's war in the Caucasus when it recognized the independence of Kosovo earlier this year without United Nations authorization, and against Moscow's wishes. The Kremlin warned at the time that Bush had established a principle in Kosovo that Russia might want to apply to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Now Russia has, and Bush has left the United States little basis to protest.
