Mikheil Saakashvili, the 40-year-old United States-educated
lawyer and president of Georgia, has much to learn about
realpolitik and the nature and limitations of state power.
Whether he will remain in office long enough to learn them
is, however, another matter.
Last Thursday and Friday the hyperactive and frequently
volatile Georgian leader began an adventure that those more
experienced in the arts of military provocation could have
advised him was likely to have just one outcome.
Four days later, with his forces pummelled, pushed back from
South Ossetia, and given a good military hiding, all he could
do was entreat the West to intervene on his behalf with the
big bad Russian bear.
But the West, despite having shown him support in the past,
was not exactly in a hurry to accede.
The problem was that, by most accounts, it was President
Saakashvili who, having encountered a degree of sustained
provocation, started this rash, unlovely episode.
First, a bit of history: in the wake of the break-up of the
Soviet Union, the Ossetians found themselves a people divided
- to the north of the Caucasus in Russia, and in the south in
Georgia.
The South Ossetians, however, despite sharing territory with
Georgians, were more inclined towards Russia and a war ensued
in 1990-91, followed by a de facto secession in 1991.
For a decade or so those Georgians who remained and Ossetians
co-existed, traded, and got on with life under a generally
corrupt leadership more or less supported by Moscow.
Then, in 2004, Mr Saakashvili, openly allied to the United
States and the West, came to power on a platform that
included reclaiming South Ossetia and Abkhazia for Georgia.
In the meantime, Russia had arguably been annexing Ossetia by
stealth, which Georgians inevitably saw as a prelude to
possible assaults on their own territorial integrity, and
thus provocative in the extreme.
On Thursday night, under the guise of cease-fire with warring
Ossetian militia, President Saakashvili, having earlier cut
off water supplies, launched an all-out assault on the main
town of Tskhinvali.
Perhaps gambling that with world attention on the opening of
the Olympic Games in Beijing and with Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin in attendance, he could press home and
consolidate Georgian advantage before anyone noticed.
But he gambled wrongly.
The revealing sight over the weekend of a purposeful former
president Putin back in Russia and pressing the flesh with an
arrary of high ranking military officials was indication
enough, for those who have long suspected it, that it is the
former president and ex-KGB hard man who still wields the
real power in Russia.
And, as with Chechnya, when it comes to matters territorial,
he has been shown to be particularly uncompromising.
So it was to prove on this occasion, with the Russian army
and airforce taking the opportunity not only to evict
Georgian troops from Tskhinvali, but to hammer other Georgian
targets for good measure.
United States Vice-president Dick Cheney has spoken out
against this "Russian aggression", but elsewhere in the West
there has been silence.
There is no mood for involvement in such a territorial spat.
As published in this newspaper yesterday, both sides are
behaving badly; it is outrageous that Russia is attacking
Georgian towns and airfields.
Restraint is urgently needed.
But the moral of this tragic little story is that if you are
going to kick sand in the face of someone several times
bigger and more powerful than you, then you had better have
persuasive muscle and a pretty good strategic plan to back
you up.
President Saakashvili, it appears, had neither.
Not only has he forfeited disputed South Ossetia, probably
permanently, it looks as if the other contentious
semi-autonomous territory, Abkhazia, will go the same way.
In addition, his precipitous actions have destroyed a good
part of the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali, led to the
loss of many lives and unnecessarily created a great deal of
social chaos and suffering.
In all likelihood he has stymied Georgian ambitions towards
Nato membership and closer alliances with western Europe.
And finally, in a stunning trifecta of own-goals, he has
probably sealed his personal fate: in the face of this
comprehensive misjudgement with all its counter-productive
repercussions, it seems unlikely in the long term that he can
survive as Georgian leader.
Yes, there is fault to be laid at Prime Minister Putin's
door, and President Saakashvili may well now bleat that the
power of Moscow is overwhelming, full of ambitious intent and
dangerous to Western democracy, but all he has done through
his ill-advised militarism is to consolidate it.
