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Going back to the original topic, of removing the disgrace that Felgenhauer is, a point that opposing editors don't want to debate, Xeeron and Kober would rather make Ad Hominems against me than actually engage in intelligent debate, here's an argument that discredits Felgenhauer's whole theory: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2008-151-12.cfm
"Pavel Felgenhauer’s conspiracy theory has several major wholes in it. First of all, it relies on the false assumption that contingency plans constitute decided actions. This is the same mistake made by those who supported the various conspiracy theories surrounding the August 1991 party-siloviki putsch against Gorbachev and Yeltsin. More or less normal contingency plans for instituting emergency rule and martial law were loosely interpreted as plans to implement them at a soon-to-be-determined time and place.
Second, the entire Russian ‘plan’ would have been undone, if Saakashvili had agreed to sign the agreement proposed by Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia to reject the use of force to resolve Georgia’s self-made‘frozen conflicts.’ It was Saakashvili’s willingness to use force that allowed him, if he indeed was, to be sucked into using force. This means that he was as complicit as the Russians were in the frozen conflict’s thaw and devolution into violence. Both sides were spoiling for a fight and to one extent or another were doing their best to bait the other side into flagrantly breaking the ceasefire by way of a major incursion. In other words, it is unclear who entrapped whom. As usual a certain ilk of ‘analyst’ is willing to entertain this possibility in relation to the Russian side; for that ilk the Russians are always entirely to blame, and the West and whomever the present administration has designated an ally are not.
Felgenhauer mentions Russia's April tranfer of unarmed troops to Abkhazia to make repairs of the Abkhaz railroad for transport of Russian military equipment and the shooting down of the Israeli-suppled recon drones. He neglects to mention that if the railraod repairs were preparation for war, what were the recon flights for?
He mentions the Russian 58th army's maneuvers, but neglects the American-Georgian military excercies being conducted at the same time. One is seen as preparation for war, the other is ignored. Clearly both were intended as general preparation in the even of war. It is possible that niether or both were part of mobilization for an already planned attack. Felgenhauer neglects the fact that Georgian forces stepped up their activities and moved heavy artillery closer to Tskhinval during their maneuvers with U.S. forces. In RFERL writer Brian Whitmore's rehash of Felgenhauer's material he mentions that "(a)t center stage in the Russian maneuvers was...Russia's 58th Army, the very unit that would later play a key role in the incursion." This supposedly revealing 'coincdence' is intended to be further 'proof' that Russia had decidec on war. Omitted from Whitmore's piece is that any maneuvers in Russia's North Caucasus would include the 58th Army which is the nucleus of its military presence there and has been fighting Chechen separatists and Caucasus jihadists for years. American taxpayers might wonder why their hard-earned money is funding pro-Georgian propaganda by the "independent" organization "funded by the U.S. Congress"?!
Felgenhauer’s reliance on the conspiracy theories surrounding the Chechen jihadists’ long-planned invasion of Dagestan in 1999 further undermine his interpretation. The Russian did not need to goad jihadists like Shamil Basaev and global jihadist and al Qaeda operative Khattab to attack Dagestan. The Chechen and foreign jihadists had been conspiring with Dagestan jihadists’ for well over a year to establish an Islamic jamaat/caliphate in several Dagestani villages and months before their attack were declaring their intention to do so. The same conspiratorial approach surrounds that period’s Moscow and Volgadonsk apartment bombings, for which both Basaev and Khattab took responsibility by acknowledging that Dagestanis had carried it out.
These conspiracy theories are similar to those surrounding the Bush administration and Mossad and 9/11 and deserve about as much credence. That is why no semi-serious, no less serious analyst pays them much heed.
Dr. Gordon M. Hahn –Senior Researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program and Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group; and Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View – Russia Media Watch, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com. Dr Hahn is author of two well-received books, Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007) and Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002), and numerous articles on Russian politics."
In other words, the only critique of Felgenhauer's "argument" has pointed out that it is a conspiracy theory, yet the pro-Georgian lobby want to present it as an actual statement by an analyst, because it fits their views. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 20:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
From Pavel Felgenhauer Ph.D. Defense analyst and columnist, Novaya Gazeta
I am not a party to the discussions between Gordon Hahn and Col. Hamilton. Mr. Hahn's arguments do not seem to be serious, say, like the passage from his #180 JRL contribution: "Col. Hamilton claims that in the New York Times September 16 article regarding tapes purporting to sound Ossetian and Russian soldiers around the Roki Tunnel on Aug 7 ushering Russian forces into South Ossetia, are described in the article as "credible by U.S. intelligence sources." If these are the same sources that gave us the pipes from Nigeria and Iran's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program, I would suggest that we NOT form our Russia and Georgian policies or our view of the Ossetian war based on this interpretation of these tapes."
Of course, there have been other multiple reports and interviews given by Russian solders, published in different Russian newspapers that report first-hand evidence that Russian troops began the invasion of Georgia on August 7^th and actually crossed the border before the Georgian troops attacked the Ossetian positions in the Tskhinvali region. Newsru.com published a good summery of such reports on September 11. But even if the New York Times tapes were not supported by other evidence, do "pipes from Nigeria and Iran's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program" in anyway discredit them? Did Mr. Hahn establish that the same people were involved with vetting the pipes, the program and the tapes?
Mr. Hahn stepped out of his way in his #180 JRL contribution to personally attack my murdered friend Anna Politkovskaya and the Novaya Gazeta in which she worked and I still do: "I would encourage those who can read Russian to read the Novaya Gazeta articles on the Georgian elections as well. Remember this "Russian newspaper" was Anna Politkovskaya's home, and there are many more Anna Politkovskayas at Novaya. On occasion they engage in something other than the kind of reporting that paints the worst possible picture of Russia that is so well received by people of Col. Hamilton's "mindset".....most of the time."
Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for her reporting. Novaya Gazeta is indeed a "Russian newspaper" that is not controlled by the Kremlin. This has put the journalists of Novaya Gazeta into mortal danger. I do hope that there are indeed "more Anna Politkovskayas at Novaya" and we do our best to resist censorship and political repression in Russia. We put our lives and well-being in constant jeopardy by trying to exercise free expression in a corrupt and repressive Russia. Mr. Hahn seems to be jeering cheerfully from the nice safety of his sunny California tenure, maybe awaiting that "more Anna Politkovskayas at Novaya" are murdered and the voice of independent journalism is finally squashed in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
[Russia-Georgia conflict, start of hostilities] Dale Herspring, a University Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a retired US diplomat and Navy captain.
Let me begin by stating the obvious. The jury is still out on who started this conflict. Having said that, I think the following are worthy of attention.
What do we know?
1. Based on conversations with the American trainers, it is clear that the Georgians were not ready for such a conflict. They were being trained, not for a conflict in South Ossetia, but for Iraq. They arrived at work on August 7, only to find that their troops (who they were supposed to train for three weeks), were sitting on their rucksacks singing folk songs. Obviously, something was up from the Georgian side.
2. It is not clear who provoked who. There are a number of sources claiming that the South Ossetians clearly provoked the Georgians, just as there are sources claiming the opposite. The bottom line is that this was a brutal, ethnic free-for-all and if one side didn't prokoke it the other side might have.
3. Based on what I have seen thus far, it appears relatively clear to me that Saakashvilli decided to retake control over South Ossetia, and in response to firing from the South Ossetian side (whether real or created) decided to "normalize" the situation.
4. This brings us to the Russian question -- was the Russian Army just waiting for an opportunity to attack the Georgians and liberate South Ossetia and Abkhazia as Felgenhauer asserts?
-- Again the material is unclear.
a. on the pro side.
-- the Russian Army had just finished Kavkaz 2008 in which it rehearhsed exactly this scenario. It is hard to convince any one with a military background that it was "just getting prepared for a future conflict as one person put it to me." The same troops, the same equipment, the same weapons? Six months later, perhaps, but a week later? Very supicious.
-- The Russian logistics network was already to go. Ships in Sevastapol were loaded (and that is something that cannot be done over night), and the same was reportedly true of the ground logistics capability. The same was true of the Railroad Troops fixing the rails in Abkhazia. Again, the argument can be made that it was just a case of being "prudent," but it is clearly very suspicious.
-- The Russian units involved were probably the only in the Russian Army at this point that could have been used effectively. The Naval Infantry at Sevastapol, the Airborne regiment at Pskov, and the 58th has experience in Chechnya.
-- It took the Russian military 12 hours to respond, although that might be fast given the sorry state the Russian military remains in at present.
b. on the con side.
-- If the Russian military had known this invasion was coming, it would have been saddled up waiting for the go sign. In fact, it wasn't at least insofar as the troops were concerned.
-- 12 hour response time suggests that the troops were relaxed. They may have expected a need to deploy forces, but could have been caught by surprise when it happened. The Georgians may have preempted.
-- based on comments from senior Russian military officials and commentators, the Russian military screwed up the operation, even to the point of getting planes shot down and its general wounded. Clearly, an intelligence failure, which I am told cost the commanding general his stars.
-- was the delay and were the screw-ups due to the incompetence of Russian troops or does it mean they really did not know the Georgian action was forthcoming? It is impossible for me to say.
4. The rest of Felgenhauer's commentary is possible, but who knows? I think we are going to have to wait until we get more data. I would advise against jumping to conclusions at this point. Although someone else may have conclusive data, I don't have it, nor does Felgenhauer -- even though I submit that his claims must be taken seriously, which has not happened in Moscow where they are dismissed with no counter evidence.
Currently, the biggest threat to a viable solution for the Georgian conflict is the blame game, consisting of theories trying to single out one party responsible for the provocations leading to Saakashvili's order to attack the city of Tskhinvali. Multiple parties have played negative roles in the runup to the night of the 7th of August, but now it is time to put the genie back into the bottle. A local conflict that caused a diplomatic row of almost global proportions should again be approached as a microconflict. The solution will be found in mediation between South Ossetian, Abkhazian and Georgian sides, with international help, but without drawing international partners into a conflict with each other.
In this light I would like make a few comments on Pavel Felgenhauer's elaborate attempt to convince his readers of a pervasive Russian intent behind the outburst of violence.
Of course Felgenhauer is right when he says that a Russian incursion into Georgia was planned in advance. It's called a contingency plan. Russia should have had such a plan from the moment it sent its peacekeepers into the region in the early nineties. Perhaps in those years such an operation would have been too much to ask from the Russian military.
This year the Russian military trained its contingency plan during the Kavkaz-2008 exercise. "One week before the war, Air Force, Navy, and Army forces completed their final readiness check in a locality close to the Georgian border", Felgenhauer writes. What he doesn't mention is that during the same period the Georgian military trained to liberate a city occupied by enemy combatants in a NATO "immediate response" exercise.
I doubt we should blame either military for being prepared. The timing of political decisions tells us much more. A short five hours after Saakashvili's eloquent 7:10 PM call for dialogue and peace, the Georgian Ministry of Defense declared that a military operation was underway to restore constitutional order in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. In effect this meant the indiscriminate shelling of a city with thousands of civilians present.
Felgenhauer's colleague Aleksandr Golts concludes it took Russian forces 13 to 14 hours to reach the area of the fighting. On Wednesday the 21th it took the ICRC 7 hours drive from Vladikavkaz to Tskhinvali. How to explain the delay? Felgenhauer reports "monstrous jams" and "obsolete and decrepit Russian equipment breaking down". He is most likely right, but what about additional delay in decision-making?
At Russia's request, the Security Council held consultations at 11 pm followed by an open meeting at 1:15 am with Georgia attending. The Council members were unable to come to a consensus. Perhaps Russia did search for a diplomatic solution before deploying its troops. Medvedev was probably not surprised by the Georgian assault, but at that moment he still had different options on the table, one of which was asking the international community to restrain Tbilisi. Unlike in September 2006 when both EU representative Peter Semneby and his US counterpart Daniel Fried publicly reprimanded Georgia for its provocations, this time there was no timely international call for restraint.
In those first 13 to 14 hours, while the Russian army was stuck in "monstrous jams", it was the Ossetian militia and volunteers from the North Caucasus who fought off the Georgian army. It's not fully clear why Felgenhauer writes about "Saakashvili's unexpectedly powerful assault" and "the instantaneous routing of Ossetian formations". Army Capt. Jeff Barta, who helped train a Georgian brigade for peacekeeping service in Iraq, told AP that "The Georgians weren't ready for combat", although "they do not lack 'warrior spirit.'"
Such an assessment better fits the picture of the army's withdrawal after Russian troops secured Tskhinvali. Not only was military equipment left behind, so was the population. A vacuum took shape in which HRW had to ask the Russian military to provide security to the population. Of course the Russian army is not the ideal actor to fulfill such a function, but who else was there except the Ossetian militia and volunteers from the North Caucasus?
Let us now move our focus to the western part of Georgia, or if you wish the area in and around Abkhazia. Felgenhauer writes about "a long-planned operation to 'clear' the upper part of the Kodori Gorge". Again, such an operation must have been planned, but I suggest we have a short look at the interactive map on the UNOMIG website, where we may read that since 1994 one of the tasks of the UN mission has been to "monitor the withdrawal of Georgian troops from the Kodori valley to places beyond the boundaries of Abkhazia (Georgia)". Indiscriminate violence should have been avoided, but "clearing" the Kodori Valley has not been an entirely illegitimate operation.
UNOMIG's interactive map shows us more. The cities of Senaki and Poti are not deep in Georgia proper. Both border on the Restricted Weapons Zone agreed upon in 1994 in SC resolution 937. Yes, Russia's incursion into these cities violated the mentioned agreement, but how disproportionate is it to destroy heavy military equipment amassed on the border of the RWZ by a country that just broke a cease-fire agreement using multiple rocket launchers to assault a city with civilians present? I am not arguing that Russia's reaction has been proportionate. I am only saying that Felgenhauer's piece does not provide us with sufficient information to fairly asses that question.
Lastly, when Felgenhauer wrote his piece, published on the 14th by Novaya Gazeta, he could not have known that a week later the Financial Times would print an interview with Georgian deputy defense minister Batu Kutelia in which the latter stressed that "Georgia did not believe Russia would respond to its offensive in South Ossetia and was completely unprepared for the counterattack". Perhaps Felgenhauer has better sources of information than Georgia's deputy defense minister; perhaps he is just guessing.
Let me end with a note of harmony. I fully agree with Felgenhauer that foreign peacekeeping contingents should be moved into Georgia as soon as possible. I also agree with him that these international peacekeeping forces should include a Russian contingent. The Ossetian population will simply not accept otherwise. A double ring of peacekeepers, with an international force commanded by a large European nation with strong economic ties with Russia on the Georgian side and the Russians on the Ossetian and Abkhazian sides, can do the job. As soon as the international community can decide upon such a mission, international peacekeepers may replace the Russian forces where they should not be, for example in Poti. The ball is now in our court.
But do we care enough about stability in the Caucasus to send our peacekeepers to that region? And how can we encourage such a decision? By uniting against Russia, or by cooperating with Russia?
Extensive war preparations like those Felgengauer describes do not prove that a definite decision has been taken in favor of war, only that the leadership wants to have the option of war available. The US has made extensive preparations for war with Iran ("preparing the battlefield"), but as yet there is no definite decision to go to war.
To be more precise, extensive preparations usually make available a range of more or less far-reaching military options. The option finally chosen can then be made dependent on circumstances as they evolve. Thus, for the Russian operation in Georgia a minimum option might have been confined to introducing forces into Abkhazia and South Ossetia to back up recognition of their "independence." A maximum option might have entailed occupying Tbilisi and enforcing regime change -- though not, I suspect, advancing south of Tbilisi because this would have threatened core Western interests (i.e., the oil and gas pipelines). What happened in the event was an option between these two.
I think that the two key aspects of the evolving situation that may have influenced the choice of option were:
(1) the Georgian reaction to the creeping annexation of South Ossetia in its various aspects (making more Ossets Russian citizens, expulsion of inhabitants of Georgian villages in SO, etc.)
(2) the reaction of the West.
Given a Western reaction restricted to rhetoric, I think that if there had been no significant Georgian reaction the operation would have been limited to the minimum option, as defined above. This would not have attracted so much world attention and would almost certainly have sufficed to block Georgia's accession to NATO, which is after all the main Russian goal. The political costs of going further under those circumstances would have exceeded the military benefits.
However, the Georgian attack on Tskhinval sharply changed this calculus in Russia's favor. It meant that even if a more ambitious option was selected world opinion would be confused and divided. Instead of Russia finding itself isolated internationally for clear-cut aggression, many people throughout the world (most importantly in Europe) sympathized with the Osset victims and adopted a position equidistant between the sides.
I found myself agreeing with Dale Herspring's comments to Felgenhauer's thesis about "Russian provocation". We cannot know yet who provoked who.
However, I do think that in a sense, all sides were ready for the war.
Saakashvili may - we don't really know - have been trapped by the Russians, or perhaps by the South Ossetians going it alone - but he was also trapped by his own words about reintegrating South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I think many of us have underestimated the dangers of ever-escalating rhetoric and ever more serious clashes each summer since 2004. It is dangerous to speak about peace with a soaring military budget in the background, especially when you have powerful neighbours with interests in your region. On this background, of course the Russians were prepared. And of course Saakashvili was easy to provoke, if that is what happened.
While the details are still unknown, I suspect this was a classic case of August 1914 - all parties being bound by their obligations and blinded by their own nationalism (Georgia) and the yearning to once again rule the Caucasus (Russia). Everybody simply played a dangerous game, and war in the end broke out, perhaps even to the surprise of quite a few of the actors.
But what happened afterwards with the Russians going deep into Georgia, destroying infrastructure and military bases, need not have been planned to the same extent as the invasion. Perhaps it was just too good an opportunity to let go, seen from the Kremlin?
So pre-planned from April - well, in a sense, perhaps, but in another sense, the last two years of long escalation between Georgia and Russia at least should have prepared everyone for war, and I think that is far more important.
Ingerid M Opdahl Research Fellow The Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies
www.ifs.mil.no
In regard to Professor Herspring’s recent posting on JRL on August 22 - the good Professor and former Navy captain does not, apparently understand the difference between the deployment into battle of a combined army task force, supported by air and Navy, and a limo or pizza delivery service that can be expected to turn up in an hour after receiving an order.
I have been since the unsuccessful coup in August 1991 following closely Russian/Soviet patterns of military readiness and deployment. If the Russian response would have been indeed only a reaction to a sudden Georgian attack, it would have taken at least a week to send a vanguard force into South Ossetia and a month to organize a full-scale invasion.
The 4,000 vanguard troops sent into Georgia with hundreds of pieces of armor that reached Tskhinvali within 15 hours of the Georgian offensive consisted of troops based from Moscow and Pskov that are thousands of kilometers from the battlefield. The nearest airstrip to Tskhinvali is Beslan - over 200 kilometers of narrow mountain road, a narrow 5 kilometer tunnel and they also had to break throw Georgian positions to reach Tskhinvali. The 20,000 plus Russian troops thousands of armor, naval ships and air forces from all over Russia were assembled and ready for the invasion of Georgia in August beforehand and began moving into the attack before the Georgians that much more roads of approach and less distance to cover.
In my most recent article published in EDM on August 25, I have quoted VPK - a military/intelligence establishment closely connected publication in Moscow - that states the same - the troops were propositioned for an invasion of Georgia and fully prepared for immediate attack action. In that article I wrote:
“A Moscow defense weekly connected to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's former KGB associates and published by the state corporation Rostekhnologiy has admitted that the invasion of Georgia was prepared well in advance. The troops that crossed the Georgian border on August 8 were concentrated in attack positions in full readiness for immediate action under the cover of military exercises Kavkaz-2008 that ended on August 2. Massive troop reinforcements were also ready to follow up the initial attack (VPK, August 20).”
Reports that the Russians were somewhat caught off guard on August 8 - are crude and false propaganda.
Sincerely, Pavel Felgenhauer.
"It would have taken at least a week to send a vanguard force into South Ossetia"? Oh wow. I gotta post this on the VDV website, so everyone can have a great laugh. "[A] month to organize a full-scale invasion"? Good one! I am rolling on the floor laughing! Does Pavel Felgenhauer know what contingency planning is?
"The 20,000 plus Russian troops thousands of armor, naval ships and air forces from all over Russia were assembled and ready for the invasion of Georgia in August beforehand and began moving into the attack before the Georgians that much more roads of approach and less distance to cover." - Umm, actually that's wrong. According to the MDB, most Georgian troops got their on August 7th, most Russian troops on August 10th.
"In regard to Professor Herspring’s recent posting on JRL on August 22 - the good Professor and former Navy captain does not, apparently understand the difference between the deployment into battle of a combined army task force, supported by air and Navy, and a limo or pizza delivery service that can be expected to turn up in an hour after receiving an order. " - yeah, Pavel Felgenhauer, who never fought, nor has any military degrees, is clearly more qualified to make such assessments, than a navy captain participating in amphibious operations.
"The 4,000 vanguard troops sent into Georgia with hundreds of pieces of armor that reached Tskhinvali within 15 hours of the Georgian offensive consisted of troops based from Moscow and Pskov that are thousands of kilometers from the battlefield." - and here Felgenhauer is praying that we don't pay attention to geography. "Distance from Moscow, Russia to Tbilisi, Georgia is 1020.7 Miles." http://www.happyzebra.com/m/distance-calculator/index.php?city=Moscow&city2=Tbilisi The cruise speed for an Antonov Transport airplane is 490 mph. The troops from Moscow and Pskov are paratroops. (For some reason Pavel Felgenhauer neglected to mention this.) The paratroops don't need an air strip. In other words, at cruising speed, the troops would have been parachuted in Tskhinval, which is closer to Moscow than Tbilisi, within two hours. This isn't original research, this is basic addition and division. Assuming that they needed to get to their base, and to parachute successfully, we'll give that another hour apiece, that's more than enough time. So in under four hours, not a week, Russia would have sent the paratroops from Moscow and Pskov.
"I have been since the unsuccessful coup in August 1991 following closely Russian/Soviet patterns of military readiness and deployment. If the Russian response would have been indeed only a reaction to a sudden Georgian attack, it would have taken at least a week to send a vanguard force into South Ossetia and a month to organize a full-scale invasion."
That's what the Kavkaz-2008 exercises were for, it's called a contingency plan. But were does it say that the Kavkaz-2008 exercises were planned in April? HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 21:18, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
I.D.: Goltz is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author among other books of Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of Political Chaos and War in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, M.E. Sharpe, 2006, soon to be re-issued in paperback with a new Epilogue
Tbilisi/Baku, August 28, 2008
Well, it seems to be over, surprise, surprise, unless it turns into WW III, which I hope it does not.
The Caucasus War of 8.8.8 that is, the two-week (or two day) hurly burly in the mountainous southwest corner of the defunct Soviet Union that was a national debacle for West-obsessed Georgia and a crushing victory for a resurgent Russia.
For those of you who chose to watch the Beijing Olympics instead, which seemed to be timed almost purposely to create maximum distraction from the seismic events happening in the place that gave rise to the legend of Pandora’s Box getting re-opened, geo-politically speaking, let me fill you in on a fistful of details.
On August 8, in a coordinated land, air and sea assault, the pre-positioned military of the Russian Federation attacked the Republic of Georgia, theoretically to defend its citizens of Ossetian ethnicity from what it described as a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Georgians. Those citizens under siege happened to live in a tiny, mountainous region known as South Ossetia (within Georgia), but which just happens to abut on the Autonomous Republic of North Ossetia (within the Russian Federation). South Ossetia, populated by around 60,000 Ossets and 40,000 Georgians, had enjoyed a fuzzy sort of independence since 1991, although efforts to peacefully re-integrate the territory back into Georgia have been going on for years. The reintegration process effectively ended when Moscow began distributing Russian passports to the Ossets living in the territory over the past year or two (but not the Georgians), thus making them Russian citizens on the spot, and deserving of Russian protection, even outside Russia’s borders. And so the war began.
By August 9 (and certainly the 10th), the one-sided contest was over for all intents and purposes, with the Russian side having thrown all American-trained Georgian military and police out of South Ossetia, taken over much of the rest of northern Georgia, and seemed poised to make an assault on the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, which was a mere 25 miles/40 kilometers away from the Russian front lines. Meanwhile, to the west, Russian tanks, troops and other gear were rushed to a second breakaway area of Georgia known as the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, lest the impetuous Georgians open a second front there, with the result that whatever Georgian military (and civilians) that remained in the territory were forced out, too, albeit with scarcely a shot getting fired.
By August 11, Georgia had in effect capitulated, and was begging for international diplomatic intervention. Russian tanks ruled the land, Russian aviation ruled the skies and Russian naval craft ruled the shores of the Black Sea. And Russian propaganda largely ruled the airwaves, too. That last victory might be summed up by the way the short war is usually represented even in the western media: namely, that the Russian counter-attack had been massively successful, and the man to blame for the mess was not Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (and certainly not Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) but the mercurial Georgian President, Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili. Not.
A ‘counter attack’ assumes an initial attack, and the Georgians, while perhaps guilty of being lured into a trap, never attacked Russia. Rather, in the days prior to 8.8.8, Georgia had been responding to an escalating series of provocations inside South Ossetia and to a lesser extent in Abkhazia. That is how the war began, and how it should be remembered: it was and is a war of provocation followed by creeping annexation, and planned and executed with a surprising degree of efficiency, and complete audacity.
This was no where more in evidence than the decision by the Upper House of the Russian Duma on August 25th to recommend the recognition of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, IE, to tear these territories away from Georgia, and forever. The parliamentary decision was next passed by the Lower House and then signed by President Medvedev within 24 hours of its initial getting tabled, to the joy of the Ossetians and Abkhaz, the shock and anguish of Georgia and the baffled cries of ‘foul play!’ in western capitals. A bed-rock of the international system of relations between countries in place since 1945, namely, the inviolability of the territorial integrity of existing states, had just been removed, and Pandora’s Box opened.
In some cynical circles, we call this The Texas Solution, because it so resembles the series of US provocations of Mexico that started with the Alamo and ended with the storming of the Halls of Montezuma and the creation of the (temporary) Texas Republic of 1840 before its annexation as the Lone Star State into the United States in 1845.
For an alternative history of that war, I would recommend The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Although most of the book is devoted to Grant’s reduction of the Confederacy, it is the first part of the Memoirs that pertains to Russia’s creeping annexation of northern and western Georgia, namely, how a young Lt. Grant viewed President Polk’s Remember The Alamo! campaign against Mexico, starting with the sort of cross-border provocations that would force Mexico to retaliate, and young Grant’s participation in the entire campaign.
“The occupation, separation and annexation (of Texas by the US in 1845) were, from the inception of the movement until its consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union,” he wrote.
And more.
“The Southern Rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.(and) Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Grant declared himself bitterly opposed to the war, which he regarded as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
What will the unintended consequences of Russia’s creeping annexation of the two Georgian autonomous territories be, when it has its own fair share of legally recognized sub-republics, such as Chechnya? Will a Russian lieutenant in the 58th Army in the war against Georgia of 8.8.8 one day write his memoirs about a distant, footnote in history?
I truly hope so, because the wash of propaganda coming out of Moscow right now needs correction, even fifty years hence.
As for the Georgian response to the disaster, only time will tell if Mr Saakashvili can survive; there is sufficient animosity growing against him both domestically and even in western capitals that would suggest that he cannot remain in power much longer, particularly after the ‘formal’ departure of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russians have made it absolutely clear that they will not tolerate any military adventures that Tbilisi might want to mount, and short of going into a stand-off that might lead us into WW III, no western power, however friendly to Georgia, is going to challenge Moscow on the matter with military might. Like ‘Old Mexico’ being forced to live with the reality of first an independent and then US state of Texas across the Rio Grande River, future generations of Georgians are apparently just have to get used to living without the chunks of their ancestral homeland once known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Other paradigms, all evoking the concept of the ‘phantom limb’ syndrome experienced by amputees, are the Kingdom of Jordan’s loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem through war with Israel in 1967, and then final renunciation of all Jordanian claims to that territory a decade later, or Syria’s now very passive, even plaintive whisper that the province of Iskenderoon, which became Turkey’s province of Hatay by quasi-rigged plebiscite in 1938, come home to the motherland some day.
Other observers of shifting frontiers will have their own favorite lost-limb stories, but mine concerns the Scandinavian regions known as Jamtland and Harjedalen, forcibly ceded by Norway to Sweden following the 1645 Peace of Bromsebro, a loss that was not even papered over by the union between those Nordic states during the friendlier period of 1814-1905. To this day, the King of Norway (and indeed all naval officers) keep two buttons unbuttoned on their dress togs remembering those two, obscure chunks of fjord and mountain, and hoping for their eventual return.
I shared that anecdote with Saakashvili at a late night meeting last week; he almost seemed to smile.
By Nikolaus von Twickel / Staff Writer
In war, the saying goes, truth is the first casualty. In South Ossetia, it seems, truth has been battered so ruthlessly that it is virtually impossible to determine who fired the first shot.
It's even hard to figure out when it was fired.
Tbilisi and Moscow are accusing each other of planning the war well in advance of Aug. 8, when the Georgian army attacked the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali. Georgia says it was forced to attack after its soldiers in the area came under heavy fire from separatists.
With information and misinformation flying in all directions, it might take some time before the real facts are known.
In the meantime, theories are swirling about how Russia managed to set 2,000 tanks and 20,000 servicemen in motion in just 48 hours and why, on the eve of the war, the South Ossetian government sent hundreds of children across the border to Russia and 48 Russian journalists were camped out in a Tskhinvali hotel.
"There is no question that Russia had planned its measures long before," Georgian Reintegration Minister Temur Iakobashvili said in a recent interview in Tbilisi.
Russia echoes the accusation, countering that Georgia had long-planned the military operation.
The country's top mediator in the conflict, ambassador-at-large Yury Popov, said in an interview Wednesday that he had witnessed Georgian forces mobilizing on Aug. 7, one day before he was to hold direct talks with Iakobashvili in Tskhinvali.
Popov said he was returning from Tskhinvali to Tbilisi late that evening when, near the village of Tkviavi -- a few kilometers south of Tskhinvali -- he encountered Georgian units moving heavy weaponry into the conflict zone.
"I saw artillery howitzers and rocket launchers," Popov said.
Meanwhile, one photojournalist said Russia, having brought dozens of journalists into the breakaway region several days before heavy fighting erupted, appeared well-aware that major violence was imminent.
Said Tsarnayev, a Chechen freelance photographer, said he and a colleague came to Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 for a nature shoot and was surprised to find the town teeming with reporters from Moscow.
"When we checked in to our hotel, there were 48 other journalists," Tsarnayev said by telephone from Grozny. "I did not expect such a number."
When he suggested to Mikhail Zheglov, his editor at state news agency RIA-Novosti, that he go to South Ossetia to take pictures two weeks earlier, Tsarnayev said the editor told him: "'You know Said, maybe it is too early. Wait a little.'"
A man who answered the phone Wednesday at RIA-Novosti said Zheglov was on vacation and could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Journalists from national media outlets confirmed that they were in place in Tskhinvali when the fighting began but said Tsarnayev's suggestions of a conspiracy were ludicrous.
"This is not true," said Marina Perevozkina, a reporter with Nezavisimaya Gazeta who was staying at Tskhinvali's Hotel Alan at the same time as Tsarnayev.
Perevozkina said those following the events in Tskhinvali closely were aware of escalating tensions for some time and that it was by pure chance that she arrived a week earlier.
"I had asked back in July to go there but was not able to because our editor was traveling in the United States," Perevozkina said. "When [editor-in-chief Konstantin Remchukov] returned on Aug. 3, he immediately allowed me to travel. That is why I arrived just days before the war started."
Ruslan Gusarov, a North Caucasus correspondent for NTV television who covered events in Tskhinvali, also dismissed the suggestion that journalists knew anything in advance.
"We knew nothing," Gusarov said by telephone from the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala. "We decided to go to Tskhinvali as the situation heated up as any other professional news organization would. That is why I worked there a whole week before Aug 8."
Indeed, international media had noted a week earlier that the conflict was escalating. On Aug. 2, the South Ossetian government said sniper and mortar fire had killed six people in the region.
Some analysts said the simmering conflict received too little coverage in the West because the two sides trade gunfire almost every summer.
"The world only found out on Friday Aug. 8 [about the small arms attacks], while in Georgia it had been news for a week," said Mark Mullen, head of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International Georgia.
This was convenient for Russia because Moscow could concentrate on, and even control, the "who started it" debate," Mullen said in an interview in Tbilisi.
"That debate is a 'he said/she said' between Tbilisi and Moscow, each of which can be casual with the truth," Mullen said.
Iakobashvili, the Georgian Reintegration Minister, said the South Ossetian authorities' decision to send hundreds of children to Russia the weekend before the war clearly showed that Moscow was planning a military campaign well in advance.
The South Ossetian leadership, however, said the decision was linked to the fatal shootings.
Statements by captured Russian soldiers also point to a premeditated Russian campaign, Iakobashvili said.
"The pilots we captured reported that they were mobilized days before Aug. 8," he said. "And you do not set 2,000 tanks and 20,000 men in motion within 48 hours. To launch an assault from sea, land and air -- as Russia did against Georgia -- requires serious preparation."
Tbilisi says it decided to attack after separatists opened fire on all Georgian checkpoints near Tskhinvali and after it received intelligence that 100 Russian armored vehicles and trucks were heading into South Ossetia through the Roksky Tunnel.
Popov, the lead Russian mediator, said the claim is false and that "absolutely no tanks" had passed through the tunnel by the time Georgia attacked. "I double checked it," he said.
Moscow, however, does not deny that it had amassed forces in the North Caucasus for military exercises in July.
Perevozkina said she saw these troops with her own eyes. In her article published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Aug. 8 -- the day the war began -- she wrote that en route to Tskhinvali she saw columns of Russian military vehicles in North Ossetia moving along the road between the town of Alagir and the border post of Nizhny Zaramag.
"The military says it is continuing training exercises, but undoubtedly Russia is demonstrating its determination to protect its citizens in South Ossetia," Perevozkina wrote. "Even including an operation to enforce peace."
Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence agency, has said Moscow was aware of a strong possibility that Georgian forces might attack. Russia responded by mobilizing equipment close to the border but refrained from crossing over so as not to jump the gun, Stratfor has said.
One might wonder why, if this were true, Russia would have abandoned its peacekeepers in Tskhinvali, where up to 20 of them were reportedly killed in the Georgian attack.
There is also confusion about last-ditch diplomatic efforts between Tbilisi and Moscow.
Iakobashvili has said he proposed talks with Popov in Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 but that the Russian mediator could not make it because of a flat tire.
Popov confirmed that a tire on his Chevrolet Suburban was punctured 10 kilometers outside of Gori as he was traveling to Tskhinvali that afternoon.
"It took 1 1/2 hours until a new car arrived, and I continued on only after 6 p.m.," Popov said.
Popov denied, however, that there had been an agreement to meet Iakobashvili that day. "We both went to Tskhinvali on separate schedules," he said.
Popov said three-way talks scheduled for Aug. 8 in Tskhinvali were canceled after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili announced -- and subsequently broke -- a unilateral cease-fire.
"When I arrived [in Tbilisi] around midnight, the war had already started," Popov said.
Both sides have argued that the other consciously chose to escalate the conflict during the vacation season, when leaders for both countries were away.
The accusation cuts nicely both ways.
On Aug. 8, President Dmitry Medvedev was vacationing on the Volga, while Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in Beijing for the opening of the summer Olympics.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has said he had planned to go to Italy and that Georgian Defense Minister David Kezerashvili was on vacation that day.
Events in the months leading up to the war, however, indicated both sides had embarked on a dangerous road long before August got hot.
Moscow had been stepping up political and military support for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In April, Putin, then the president, ordered the government to establish closer trade, economic, social and scientific links with the two rebel regions.
The Kremlin also sent reinforcements to its peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia and repaired a rail link to the Black Sea province, which Tbilisi says was used to transport military hardware in the breakaway region.
Georgia, meanwhile, sought to bolster its military with U.S. and Israeli aid and angered Moscow with its aspirations to join NATO.
It sent spy drones over the breakaway regions that were shot down by Russian jets.
Human rights activists have also accused Tbilisi of orchestrating an attack in May on two buses carrying Georgians from Abkhazia's Gali region. The busses were hit with grenades and gunfire in the village of Kurcha, and Georgia blamed Abkhaz separatists.
But members of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee said in a subsequent report that they had uncovered evidence that Georgia had staged the attack.
The writing was on the wall already in early May, when independent defense analyst Alexander Golts wrote in The Moscow Times: "Nobody wants war, but both sides are doing everything to spark a military conflict."
I'd like to see the actual links to the ALR articles Xeeron, so that I can verify the dates. None of these comments, specifically address Pavel Felgenhauer's claim that "Russia started preparing for war after April, in order to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from entering NATO". When Hahn pointed out the silliness of Pavel Felgenhauer's argument, Pavel Felgenhauer turned into the Incredible Hulk and unleashed an Ad Hominem against Hahn involving Politkovskaya, and mocking Hahn for living in sunny California; and where does Pavel Felgenhauer report from? Is he a bold embedded reporter, giving us news from the frontline?
There are two sources here, that state that "Russia may have, or may not have started mobilizing" in April. That can be said about anything. "The Holocaust deniers may have, or may not have a claim." Furthermore, the articles seem to be published very early on, and express a general state of confusion. So in other words, the only article that directly addresses Pavel Felgenhauer's points is Hahn's, to which the only rebuttal is Felgenhauer's Ad Hominem, written in a manner unworthy of a peasant, much less a historian. Added with the rather sarcastic and untrustworthy tone towards Pavel Felgenhauer that is visible in most of the commentaries, and Pavel Felgenhauer's inability to respond with anything, other than a cheap Ad Hominem, I find that the deletion of Pavel Felgenhauer from this article benefits the article enourmously. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 03:33, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Were they used in this war? The thing is, I was going over the ORBATs for both sides, in scrutinizing details, and I couldn't find a single T-80. Furthermore, the only article I found on the T-80, talked about "scores of low-slung T-80 tanks", but I'm damn certain no more than twenty, if any, were used, so that article cannot be accurate. (Scores means forty or more.) Are there any actual sources that the T-80 was used? HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 07:56, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
I propose to remove the following sentence from the Evening of 7 August section:
"However, no conclusive evidence has been presented by Georgia or its Western allies that Russia was invading the country before the Georgian attack (the Russians claim it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation, however the troop movement occured at night, which was prohibited by the agreements regulating the status of Russian peacekeepers) or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, and the Georgian claim has received little support from Georgia's allies, the US and NATO."
The sentence adds nothing to the article, it is outdated and last but not least, it is false. There are currently 6 Russian and 1 Georgian sources cited after the previous sentence, confirming the move of Russian troops over the international Russian-Georgian border before the Georgian Army began its action in South Ossetia. Somebody can argue that the intercepted calls provided by Georgia aren't credible enough, but even Russia didn't put this evidence into question - Russia explained that the move was part of routine logistics or troop rotation, which of course wasn't supposed to happen during the night and just 2 months after the previous rotation took place (in May), as normally such rotations were agreed to happen every 6 months and in accordance with all sides (which didn't happen neither), etc.
As to the second part, you can refer to the last sentences of David J. Smith's chapter in The Guns of August 2008 - Russia's War in Georgia book (p.142):
"The bottom line is that Georgia reacted to Russia's escalation as any Western democracy would have done, using diplomatic means to lodge protests at every step. It sought the help of friends. It used international organizations. It became savvier about public relations. It put forward peace proposals for the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that should at least have been taken up as points of departure for negociations.
The reality is that the August 2008 war was neither provoked nor a product of miscalculation. It was initiated and waged by Russia for well-articulated geopolitical reasons. Georgia behaved diplomatically - perhaps too long."
You claim that there is no way that Venezuela's recognition comes as a result of the war. I differ. When Russians recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as Independent Republics, Medvedev was crystal clear that the main reason was Saakashvili's attack. So tell me Colchicum, do you honestly believe that had Russia not recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, miraculously Venezuela would? Venezuela's recognition stems from Russia's recognition, which is a direct result of the war. Had there been no war, there would be no Russian recognition. Had there been no Russian recognition, there would be no Venezuelan recognition. There's a clear and direct chain of events here, where one can say that, had there been no war, there would be no Venezuelan recognition. Hence Venezuelan recognition is a direct result, via a chain of direct events, that were all started by Saakashvili's failed attack on August 7, 2008. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 06:00, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
So if any other country recognizes South-Ossetia and Abkhazia in future they will be all piled up there? You can build up massive chain of events with that logic but infobox is not really a proper place to explain whole aftermath of conflict to every last detail. I dont see Kosovo's declaration of independence and 63 states that have recognized it in infobox of Kosovo War, although we could build very realistic chain of events there too.-- Staberinde ( talk) 12:54, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
First, Georgia didn't have 17,000 men. They had up to 17,000 men. The number is 12,000 to 16,000 men in South Ossetia and 1,000 men in Abkhazia. Second, titles are capitalized. Third, we do not talk about bombing runs in the Order of Battle. As I've argued earlier, the total number was up to 10,000 soldiers, and as such cannot be 11,700 soldiers. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 03:52, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=2008_South_Ossetia_war&diff=314480417&oldid=313933401
A ton of unsourced additions. Please add sources. -- Xeeron ( talk) 15:52, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Like Totally! HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 01:16, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Yes, I know there were 600 peacekeepers. There were also an addition 500 peacekeepers from the South Ossetian Force, making their number 3,000 total. But this information belongs in the Order of Battle, not in the infobox. And also 300 men from Battalions Vostok and Zapad fought. And 200 men from the 104th. And 1700 total from the 135th. But that information doesn't belong in the infobox. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 20:45, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Guys, I've watched this as an uninvolved administrator from a distance now for several weeks. The editing situation in this article is absolutely unacceptable. For as long as I've been able to follow, more or less throughout this whole year, there has been hardly a single day where the same small group of editors has not been revert-warring against each other on this article. I strongly suggest you agree on something like an editing moratorium for a while and instead sit down together to work out why it is that this toxic situation persists, and what to do against it. If this doesn't soon improve radically, I am thinking to remove the lot of you from this article for good, on both sides of the issue. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:02, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
I want to emphasise Offliner's point above: The previous full block of the article did not help at all. And despite the high occurance of reverts, this article has been constantly and considerably improved over the last months. Most contentious points that were heavily reverted have since settled down in a version acceptable to both sides (let me point to [4], where the lastest "edit war" occured, which now seems to have found a stable version). Furthermore, if you compare the edits of "regular" editors with those of "non-regular" editors at this page, you will find that those by non-regular editors are as bad or at times worse in terms of NPOV. The main issue at hand is improving the civility of the talk page discussions such that the talk page becomes an avenue of improving the article again. -- Xeeron ( talk) 14:03, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
Now that Xeeron was kind enough to offer us all the Jamestown Organization's side of the story, let's get the story of the actual people being present there, and not those critiquing form afar: http://cominf.org/en/archive/all/2008/8/8. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 01:40, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
I think it's interesting how he calls Russia's Operation "Coerce Georgia to Peace" whereas the real name was "Force Georgia to Peace". Interesting, and totally "NPOV" verb change there. And Roy Allison publishes books with a certain Svante Cornell. Also, he's the same guy who said something about Russia and US not cooperating on Afghanistan, and I've yet to find Reality backing up that assertion. Thoughts? HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 19:21, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
I propose we cut this from the intro:
The 1991–1992 South Ossetia War between Georgians and Ossetians had left most of South Ossetia under de-facto control of a Russian-backed internationally unrecognised regional government.[43][44] Some ethnic Georgian-inhabited parts remained under the control of Georgia. This mirrored the situation in Abkhazia after the War in Abkhazia (1992–1993). Already increasing tensions escalated during the summer months of 2008.
This is actually not about the 2008 SO war, and the intro is too large as it is. Plus, we have this information in the "prelude" section in the beginning of the article. FeelSunny ( talk) 15:03, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 25 | ← | Archive 27 | Archive 28 | Archive 29 | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | → | Archive 35 |
Going back to the original topic, of removing the disgrace that Felgenhauer is, a point that opposing editors don't want to debate, Xeeron and Kober would rather make Ad Hominems against me than actually engage in intelligent debate, here's an argument that discredits Felgenhauer's whole theory: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2008-151-12.cfm
"Pavel Felgenhauer’s conspiracy theory has several major wholes in it. First of all, it relies on the false assumption that contingency plans constitute decided actions. This is the same mistake made by those who supported the various conspiracy theories surrounding the August 1991 party-siloviki putsch against Gorbachev and Yeltsin. More or less normal contingency plans for instituting emergency rule and martial law were loosely interpreted as plans to implement them at a soon-to-be-determined time and place.
Second, the entire Russian ‘plan’ would have been undone, if Saakashvili had agreed to sign the agreement proposed by Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia to reject the use of force to resolve Georgia’s self-made‘frozen conflicts.’ It was Saakashvili’s willingness to use force that allowed him, if he indeed was, to be sucked into using force. This means that he was as complicit as the Russians were in the frozen conflict’s thaw and devolution into violence. Both sides were spoiling for a fight and to one extent or another were doing their best to bait the other side into flagrantly breaking the ceasefire by way of a major incursion. In other words, it is unclear who entrapped whom. As usual a certain ilk of ‘analyst’ is willing to entertain this possibility in relation to the Russian side; for that ilk the Russians are always entirely to blame, and the West and whomever the present administration has designated an ally are not.
Felgenhauer mentions Russia's April tranfer of unarmed troops to Abkhazia to make repairs of the Abkhaz railroad for transport of Russian military equipment and the shooting down of the Israeli-suppled recon drones. He neglects to mention that if the railraod repairs were preparation for war, what were the recon flights for?
He mentions the Russian 58th army's maneuvers, but neglects the American-Georgian military excercies being conducted at the same time. One is seen as preparation for war, the other is ignored. Clearly both were intended as general preparation in the even of war. It is possible that niether or both were part of mobilization for an already planned attack. Felgenhauer neglects the fact that Georgian forces stepped up their activities and moved heavy artillery closer to Tskhinval during their maneuvers with U.S. forces. In RFERL writer Brian Whitmore's rehash of Felgenhauer's material he mentions that "(a)t center stage in the Russian maneuvers was...Russia's 58th Army, the very unit that would later play a key role in the incursion." This supposedly revealing 'coincdence' is intended to be further 'proof' that Russia had decidec on war. Omitted from Whitmore's piece is that any maneuvers in Russia's North Caucasus would include the 58th Army which is the nucleus of its military presence there and has been fighting Chechen separatists and Caucasus jihadists for years. American taxpayers might wonder why their hard-earned money is funding pro-Georgian propaganda by the "independent" organization "funded by the U.S. Congress"?!
Felgenhauer’s reliance on the conspiracy theories surrounding the Chechen jihadists’ long-planned invasion of Dagestan in 1999 further undermine his interpretation. The Russian did not need to goad jihadists like Shamil Basaev and global jihadist and al Qaeda operative Khattab to attack Dagestan. The Chechen and foreign jihadists had been conspiring with Dagestan jihadists’ for well over a year to establish an Islamic jamaat/caliphate in several Dagestani villages and months before their attack were declaring their intention to do so. The same conspiratorial approach surrounds that period’s Moscow and Volgadonsk apartment bombings, for which both Basaev and Khattab took responsibility by acknowledging that Dagestanis had carried it out.
These conspiracy theories are similar to those surrounding the Bush administration and Mossad and 9/11 and deserve about as much credence. That is why no semi-serious, no less serious analyst pays them much heed.
Dr. Gordon M. Hahn –Senior Researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program and Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group; and Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View – Russia Media Watch, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com. Dr Hahn is author of two well-received books, Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007) and Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002), and numerous articles on Russian politics."
In other words, the only critique of Felgenhauer's "argument" has pointed out that it is a conspiracy theory, yet the pro-Georgian lobby want to present it as an actual statement by an analyst, because it fits their views. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 20:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
From Pavel Felgenhauer Ph.D. Defense analyst and columnist, Novaya Gazeta
I am not a party to the discussions between Gordon Hahn and Col. Hamilton. Mr. Hahn's arguments do not seem to be serious, say, like the passage from his #180 JRL contribution: "Col. Hamilton claims that in the New York Times September 16 article regarding tapes purporting to sound Ossetian and Russian soldiers around the Roki Tunnel on Aug 7 ushering Russian forces into South Ossetia, are described in the article as "credible by U.S. intelligence sources." If these are the same sources that gave us the pipes from Nigeria and Iran's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program, I would suggest that we NOT form our Russia and Georgian policies or our view of the Ossetian war based on this interpretation of these tapes."
Of course, there have been other multiple reports and interviews given by Russian solders, published in different Russian newspapers that report first-hand evidence that Russian troops began the invasion of Georgia on August 7^th and actually crossed the border before the Georgian troops attacked the Ossetian positions in the Tskhinvali region. Newsru.com published a good summery of such reports on September 11. But even if the New York Times tapes were not supported by other evidence, do "pipes from Nigeria and Iran's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program" in anyway discredit them? Did Mr. Hahn establish that the same people were involved with vetting the pipes, the program and the tapes?
Mr. Hahn stepped out of his way in his #180 JRL contribution to personally attack my murdered friend Anna Politkovskaya and the Novaya Gazeta in which she worked and I still do: "I would encourage those who can read Russian to read the Novaya Gazeta articles on the Georgian elections as well. Remember this "Russian newspaper" was Anna Politkovskaya's home, and there are many more Anna Politkovskayas at Novaya. On occasion they engage in something other than the kind of reporting that paints the worst possible picture of Russia that is so well received by people of Col. Hamilton's "mindset".....most of the time."
Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for her reporting. Novaya Gazeta is indeed a "Russian newspaper" that is not controlled by the Kremlin. This has put the journalists of Novaya Gazeta into mortal danger. I do hope that there are indeed "more Anna Politkovskayas at Novaya" and we do our best to resist censorship and political repression in Russia. We put our lives and well-being in constant jeopardy by trying to exercise free expression in a corrupt and repressive Russia. Mr. Hahn seems to be jeering cheerfully from the nice safety of his sunny California tenure, maybe awaiting that "more Anna Politkovskayas at Novaya" are murdered and the voice of independent journalism is finally squashed in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
[Russia-Georgia conflict, start of hostilities] Dale Herspring, a University Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a retired US diplomat and Navy captain.
Let me begin by stating the obvious. The jury is still out on who started this conflict. Having said that, I think the following are worthy of attention.
What do we know?
1. Based on conversations with the American trainers, it is clear that the Georgians were not ready for such a conflict. They were being trained, not for a conflict in South Ossetia, but for Iraq. They arrived at work on August 7, only to find that their troops (who they were supposed to train for three weeks), were sitting on their rucksacks singing folk songs. Obviously, something was up from the Georgian side.
2. It is not clear who provoked who. There are a number of sources claiming that the South Ossetians clearly provoked the Georgians, just as there are sources claiming the opposite. The bottom line is that this was a brutal, ethnic free-for-all and if one side didn't prokoke it the other side might have.
3. Based on what I have seen thus far, it appears relatively clear to me that Saakashvilli decided to retake control over South Ossetia, and in response to firing from the South Ossetian side (whether real or created) decided to "normalize" the situation.
4. This brings us to the Russian question -- was the Russian Army just waiting for an opportunity to attack the Georgians and liberate South Ossetia and Abkhazia as Felgenhauer asserts?
-- Again the material is unclear.
a. on the pro side.
-- the Russian Army had just finished Kavkaz 2008 in which it rehearhsed exactly this scenario. It is hard to convince any one with a military background that it was "just getting prepared for a future conflict as one person put it to me." The same troops, the same equipment, the same weapons? Six months later, perhaps, but a week later? Very supicious.
-- The Russian logistics network was already to go. Ships in Sevastapol were loaded (and that is something that cannot be done over night), and the same was reportedly true of the ground logistics capability. The same was true of the Railroad Troops fixing the rails in Abkhazia. Again, the argument can be made that it was just a case of being "prudent," but it is clearly very suspicious.
-- The Russian units involved were probably the only in the Russian Army at this point that could have been used effectively. The Naval Infantry at Sevastapol, the Airborne regiment at Pskov, and the 58th has experience in Chechnya.
-- It took the Russian military 12 hours to respond, although that might be fast given the sorry state the Russian military remains in at present.
b. on the con side.
-- If the Russian military had known this invasion was coming, it would have been saddled up waiting for the go sign. In fact, it wasn't at least insofar as the troops were concerned.
-- 12 hour response time suggests that the troops were relaxed. They may have expected a need to deploy forces, but could have been caught by surprise when it happened. The Georgians may have preempted.
-- based on comments from senior Russian military officials and commentators, the Russian military screwed up the operation, even to the point of getting planes shot down and its general wounded. Clearly, an intelligence failure, which I am told cost the commanding general his stars.
-- was the delay and were the screw-ups due to the incompetence of Russian troops or does it mean they really did not know the Georgian action was forthcoming? It is impossible for me to say.
4. The rest of Felgenhauer's commentary is possible, but who knows? I think we are going to have to wait until we get more data. I would advise against jumping to conclusions at this point. Although someone else may have conclusive data, I don't have it, nor does Felgenhauer -- even though I submit that his claims must be taken seriously, which has not happened in Moscow where they are dismissed with no counter evidence.
Currently, the biggest threat to a viable solution for the Georgian conflict is the blame game, consisting of theories trying to single out one party responsible for the provocations leading to Saakashvili's order to attack the city of Tskhinvali. Multiple parties have played negative roles in the runup to the night of the 7th of August, but now it is time to put the genie back into the bottle. A local conflict that caused a diplomatic row of almost global proportions should again be approached as a microconflict. The solution will be found in mediation between South Ossetian, Abkhazian and Georgian sides, with international help, but without drawing international partners into a conflict with each other.
In this light I would like make a few comments on Pavel Felgenhauer's elaborate attempt to convince his readers of a pervasive Russian intent behind the outburst of violence.
Of course Felgenhauer is right when he says that a Russian incursion into Georgia was planned in advance. It's called a contingency plan. Russia should have had such a plan from the moment it sent its peacekeepers into the region in the early nineties. Perhaps in those years such an operation would have been too much to ask from the Russian military.
This year the Russian military trained its contingency plan during the Kavkaz-2008 exercise. "One week before the war, Air Force, Navy, and Army forces completed their final readiness check in a locality close to the Georgian border", Felgenhauer writes. What he doesn't mention is that during the same period the Georgian military trained to liberate a city occupied by enemy combatants in a NATO "immediate response" exercise.
I doubt we should blame either military for being prepared. The timing of political decisions tells us much more. A short five hours after Saakashvili's eloquent 7:10 PM call for dialogue and peace, the Georgian Ministry of Defense declared that a military operation was underway to restore constitutional order in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. In effect this meant the indiscriminate shelling of a city with thousands of civilians present.
Felgenhauer's colleague Aleksandr Golts concludes it took Russian forces 13 to 14 hours to reach the area of the fighting. On Wednesday the 21th it took the ICRC 7 hours drive from Vladikavkaz to Tskhinvali. How to explain the delay? Felgenhauer reports "monstrous jams" and "obsolete and decrepit Russian equipment breaking down". He is most likely right, but what about additional delay in decision-making?
At Russia's request, the Security Council held consultations at 11 pm followed by an open meeting at 1:15 am with Georgia attending. The Council members were unable to come to a consensus. Perhaps Russia did search for a diplomatic solution before deploying its troops. Medvedev was probably not surprised by the Georgian assault, but at that moment he still had different options on the table, one of which was asking the international community to restrain Tbilisi. Unlike in September 2006 when both EU representative Peter Semneby and his US counterpart Daniel Fried publicly reprimanded Georgia for its provocations, this time there was no timely international call for restraint.
In those first 13 to 14 hours, while the Russian army was stuck in "monstrous jams", it was the Ossetian militia and volunteers from the North Caucasus who fought off the Georgian army. It's not fully clear why Felgenhauer writes about "Saakashvili's unexpectedly powerful assault" and "the instantaneous routing of Ossetian formations". Army Capt. Jeff Barta, who helped train a Georgian brigade for peacekeeping service in Iraq, told AP that "The Georgians weren't ready for combat", although "they do not lack 'warrior spirit.'"
Such an assessment better fits the picture of the army's withdrawal after Russian troops secured Tskhinvali. Not only was military equipment left behind, so was the population. A vacuum took shape in which HRW had to ask the Russian military to provide security to the population. Of course the Russian army is not the ideal actor to fulfill such a function, but who else was there except the Ossetian militia and volunteers from the North Caucasus?
Let us now move our focus to the western part of Georgia, or if you wish the area in and around Abkhazia. Felgenhauer writes about "a long-planned operation to 'clear' the upper part of the Kodori Gorge". Again, such an operation must have been planned, but I suggest we have a short look at the interactive map on the UNOMIG website, where we may read that since 1994 one of the tasks of the UN mission has been to "monitor the withdrawal of Georgian troops from the Kodori valley to places beyond the boundaries of Abkhazia (Georgia)". Indiscriminate violence should have been avoided, but "clearing" the Kodori Valley has not been an entirely illegitimate operation.
UNOMIG's interactive map shows us more. The cities of Senaki and Poti are not deep in Georgia proper. Both border on the Restricted Weapons Zone agreed upon in 1994 in SC resolution 937. Yes, Russia's incursion into these cities violated the mentioned agreement, but how disproportionate is it to destroy heavy military equipment amassed on the border of the RWZ by a country that just broke a cease-fire agreement using multiple rocket launchers to assault a city with civilians present? I am not arguing that Russia's reaction has been proportionate. I am only saying that Felgenhauer's piece does not provide us with sufficient information to fairly asses that question.
Lastly, when Felgenhauer wrote his piece, published on the 14th by Novaya Gazeta, he could not have known that a week later the Financial Times would print an interview with Georgian deputy defense minister Batu Kutelia in which the latter stressed that "Georgia did not believe Russia would respond to its offensive in South Ossetia and was completely unprepared for the counterattack". Perhaps Felgenhauer has better sources of information than Georgia's deputy defense minister; perhaps he is just guessing.
Let me end with a note of harmony. I fully agree with Felgenhauer that foreign peacekeeping contingents should be moved into Georgia as soon as possible. I also agree with him that these international peacekeeping forces should include a Russian contingent. The Ossetian population will simply not accept otherwise. A double ring of peacekeepers, with an international force commanded by a large European nation with strong economic ties with Russia on the Georgian side and the Russians on the Ossetian and Abkhazian sides, can do the job. As soon as the international community can decide upon such a mission, international peacekeepers may replace the Russian forces where they should not be, for example in Poti. The ball is now in our court.
But do we care enough about stability in the Caucasus to send our peacekeepers to that region? And how can we encourage such a decision? By uniting against Russia, or by cooperating with Russia?
Extensive war preparations like those Felgengauer describes do not prove that a definite decision has been taken in favor of war, only that the leadership wants to have the option of war available. The US has made extensive preparations for war with Iran ("preparing the battlefield"), but as yet there is no definite decision to go to war.
To be more precise, extensive preparations usually make available a range of more or less far-reaching military options. The option finally chosen can then be made dependent on circumstances as they evolve. Thus, for the Russian operation in Georgia a minimum option might have been confined to introducing forces into Abkhazia and South Ossetia to back up recognition of their "independence." A maximum option might have entailed occupying Tbilisi and enforcing regime change -- though not, I suspect, advancing south of Tbilisi because this would have threatened core Western interests (i.e., the oil and gas pipelines). What happened in the event was an option between these two.
I think that the two key aspects of the evolving situation that may have influenced the choice of option were:
(1) the Georgian reaction to the creeping annexation of South Ossetia in its various aspects (making more Ossets Russian citizens, expulsion of inhabitants of Georgian villages in SO, etc.)
(2) the reaction of the West.
Given a Western reaction restricted to rhetoric, I think that if there had been no significant Georgian reaction the operation would have been limited to the minimum option, as defined above. This would not have attracted so much world attention and would almost certainly have sufficed to block Georgia's accession to NATO, which is after all the main Russian goal. The political costs of going further under those circumstances would have exceeded the military benefits.
However, the Georgian attack on Tskhinval sharply changed this calculus in Russia's favor. It meant that even if a more ambitious option was selected world opinion would be confused and divided. Instead of Russia finding itself isolated internationally for clear-cut aggression, many people throughout the world (most importantly in Europe) sympathized with the Osset victims and adopted a position equidistant between the sides.
I found myself agreeing with Dale Herspring's comments to Felgenhauer's thesis about "Russian provocation". We cannot know yet who provoked who.
However, I do think that in a sense, all sides were ready for the war.
Saakashvili may - we don't really know - have been trapped by the Russians, or perhaps by the South Ossetians going it alone - but he was also trapped by his own words about reintegrating South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I think many of us have underestimated the dangers of ever-escalating rhetoric and ever more serious clashes each summer since 2004. It is dangerous to speak about peace with a soaring military budget in the background, especially when you have powerful neighbours with interests in your region. On this background, of course the Russians were prepared. And of course Saakashvili was easy to provoke, if that is what happened.
While the details are still unknown, I suspect this was a classic case of August 1914 - all parties being bound by their obligations and blinded by their own nationalism (Georgia) and the yearning to once again rule the Caucasus (Russia). Everybody simply played a dangerous game, and war in the end broke out, perhaps even to the surprise of quite a few of the actors.
But what happened afterwards with the Russians going deep into Georgia, destroying infrastructure and military bases, need not have been planned to the same extent as the invasion. Perhaps it was just too good an opportunity to let go, seen from the Kremlin?
So pre-planned from April - well, in a sense, perhaps, but in another sense, the last two years of long escalation between Georgia and Russia at least should have prepared everyone for war, and I think that is far more important.
Ingerid M Opdahl Research Fellow The Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies
www.ifs.mil.no
In regard to Professor Herspring’s recent posting on JRL on August 22 - the good Professor and former Navy captain does not, apparently understand the difference between the deployment into battle of a combined army task force, supported by air and Navy, and a limo or pizza delivery service that can be expected to turn up in an hour after receiving an order.
I have been since the unsuccessful coup in August 1991 following closely Russian/Soviet patterns of military readiness and deployment. If the Russian response would have been indeed only a reaction to a sudden Georgian attack, it would have taken at least a week to send a vanguard force into South Ossetia and a month to organize a full-scale invasion.
The 4,000 vanguard troops sent into Georgia with hundreds of pieces of armor that reached Tskhinvali within 15 hours of the Georgian offensive consisted of troops based from Moscow and Pskov that are thousands of kilometers from the battlefield. The nearest airstrip to Tskhinvali is Beslan - over 200 kilometers of narrow mountain road, a narrow 5 kilometer tunnel and they also had to break throw Georgian positions to reach Tskhinvali. The 20,000 plus Russian troops thousands of armor, naval ships and air forces from all over Russia were assembled and ready for the invasion of Georgia in August beforehand and began moving into the attack before the Georgians that much more roads of approach and less distance to cover.
In my most recent article published in EDM on August 25, I have quoted VPK - a military/intelligence establishment closely connected publication in Moscow - that states the same - the troops were propositioned for an invasion of Georgia and fully prepared for immediate attack action. In that article I wrote:
“A Moscow defense weekly connected to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's former KGB associates and published by the state corporation Rostekhnologiy has admitted that the invasion of Georgia was prepared well in advance. The troops that crossed the Georgian border on August 8 were concentrated in attack positions in full readiness for immediate action under the cover of military exercises Kavkaz-2008 that ended on August 2. Massive troop reinforcements were also ready to follow up the initial attack (VPK, August 20).”
Reports that the Russians were somewhat caught off guard on August 8 - are crude and false propaganda.
Sincerely, Pavel Felgenhauer.
"It would have taken at least a week to send a vanguard force into South Ossetia"? Oh wow. I gotta post this on the VDV website, so everyone can have a great laugh. "[A] month to organize a full-scale invasion"? Good one! I am rolling on the floor laughing! Does Pavel Felgenhauer know what contingency planning is?
"The 20,000 plus Russian troops thousands of armor, naval ships and air forces from all over Russia were assembled and ready for the invasion of Georgia in August beforehand and began moving into the attack before the Georgians that much more roads of approach and less distance to cover." - Umm, actually that's wrong. According to the MDB, most Georgian troops got their on August 7th, most Russian troops on August 10th.
"In regard to Professor Herspring’s recent posting on JRL on August 22 - the good Professor and former Navy captain does not, apparently understand the difference between the deployment into battle of a combined army task force, supported by air and Navy, and a limo or pizza delivery service that can be expected to turn up in an hour after receiving an order. " - yeah, Pavel Felgenhauer, who never fought, nor has any military degrees, is clearly more qualified to make such assessments, than a navy captain participating in amphibious operations.
"The 4,000 vanguard troops sent into Georgia with hundreds of pieces of armor that reached Tskhinvali within 15 hours of the Georgian offensive consisted of troops based from Moscow and Pskov that are thousands of kilometers from the battlefield." - and here Felgenhauer is praying that we don't pay attention to geography. "Distance from Moscow, Russia to Tbilisi, Georgia is 1020.7 Miles." http://www.happyzebra.com/m/distance-calculator/index.php?city=Moscow&city2=Tbilisi The cruise speed for an Antonov Transport airplane is 490 mph. The troops from Moscow and Pskov are paratroops. (For some reason Pavel Felgenhauer neglected to mention this.) The paratroops don't need an air strip. In other words, at cruising speed, the troops would have been parachuted in Tskhinval, which is closer to Moscow than Tbilisi, within two hours. This isn't original research, this is basic addition and division. Assuming that they needed to get to their base, and to parachute successfully, we'll give that another hour apiece, that's more than enough time. So in under four hours, not a week, Russia would have sent the paratroops from Moscow and Pskov.
"I have been since the unsuccessful coup in August 1991 following closely Russian/Soviet patterns of military readiness and deployment. If the Russian response would have been indeed only a reaction to a sudden Georgian attack, it would have taken at least a week to send a vanguard force into South Ossetia and a month to organize a full-scale invasion."
That's what the Kavkaz-2008 exercises were for, it's called a contingency plan. But were does it say that the Kavkaz-2008 exercises were planned in April? HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 21:18, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
I.D.: Goltz is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author among other books of Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of Political Chaos and War in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, M.E. Sharpe, 2006, soon to be re-issued in paperback with a new Epilogue
Tbilisi/Baku, August 28, 2008
Well, it seems to be over, surprise, surprise, unless it turns into WW III, which I hope it does not.
The Caucasus War of 8.8.8 that is, the two-week (or two day) hurly burly in the mountainous southwest corner of the defunct Soviet Union that was a national debacle for West-obsessed Georgia and a crushing victory for a resurgent Russia.
For those of you who chose to watch the Beijing Olympics instead, which seemed to be timed almost purposely to create maximum distraction from the seismic events happening in the place that gave rise to the legend of Pandora’s Box getting re-opened, geo-politically speaking, let me fill you in on a fistful of details.
On August 8, in a coordinated land, air and sea assault, the pre-positioned military of the Russian Federation attacked the Republic of Georgia, theoretically to defend its citizens of Ossetian ethnicity from what it described as a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Georgians. Those citizens under siege happened to live in a tiny, mountainous region known as South Ossetia (within Georgia), but which just happens to abut on the Autonomous Republic of North Ossetia (within the Russian Federation). South Ossetia, populated by around 60,000 Ossets and 40,000 Georgians, had enjoyed a fuzzy sort of independence since 1991, although efforts to peacefully re-integrate the territory back into Georgia have been going on for years. The reintegration process effectively ended when Moscow began distributing Russian passports to the Ossets living in the territory over the past year or two (but not the Georgians), thus making them Russian citizens on the spot, and deserving of Russian protection, even outside Russia’s borders. And so the war began.
By August 9 (and certainly the 10th), the one-sided contest was over for all intents and purposes, with the Russian side having thrown all American-trained Georgian military and police out of South Ossetia, taken over much of the rest of northern Georgia, and seemed poised to make an assault on the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, which was a mere 25 miles/40 kilometers away from the Russian front lines. Meanwhile, to the west, Russian tanks, troops and other gear were rushed to a second breakaway area of Georgia known as the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, lest the impetuous Georgians open a second front there, with the result that whatever Georgian military (and civilians) that remained in the territory were forced out, too, albeit with scarcely a shot getting fired.
By August 11, Georgia had in effect capitulated, and was begging for international diplomatic intervention. Russian tanks ruled the land, Russian aviation ruled the skies and Russian naval craft ruled the shores of the Black Sea. And Russian propaganda largely ruled the airwaves, too. That last victory might be summed up by the way the short war is usually represented even in the western media: namely, that the Russian counter-attack had been massively successful, and the man to blame for the mess was not Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (and certainly not Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) but the mercurial Georgian President, Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili. Not.
A ‘counter attack’ assumes an initial attack, and the Georgians, while perhaps guilty of being lured into a trap, never attacked Russia. Rather, in the days prior to 8.8.8, Georgia had been responding to an escalating series of provocations inside South Ossetia and to a lesser extent in Abkhazia. That is how the war began, and how it should be remembered: it was and is a war of provocation followed by creeping annexation, and planned and executed with a surprising degree of efficiency, and complete audacity.
This was no where more in evidence than the decision by the Upper House of the Russian Duma on August 25th to recommend the recognition of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, IE, to tear these territories away from Georgia, and forever. The parliamentary decision was next passed by the Lower House and then signed by President Medvedev within 24 hours of its initial getting tabled, to the joy of the Ossetians and Abkhaz, the shock and anguish of Georgia and the baffled cries of ‘foul play!’ in western capitals. A bed-rock of the international system of relations between countries in place since 1945, namely, the inviolability of the territorial integrity of existing states, had just been removed, and Pandora’s Box opened.
In some cynical circles, we call this The Texas Solution, because it so resembles the series of US provocations of Mexico that started with the Alamo and ended with the storming of the Halls of Montezuma and the creation of the (temporary) Texas Republic of 1840 before its annexation as the Lone Star State into the United States in 1845.
For an alternative history of that war, I would recommend The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Although most of the book is devoted to Grant’s reduction of the Confederacy, it is the first part of the Memoirs that pertains to Russia’s creeping annexation of northern and western Georgia, namely, how a young Lt. Grant viewed President Polk’s Remember The Alamo! campaign against Mexico, starting with the sort of cross-border provocations that would force Mexico to retaliate, and young Grant’s participation in the entire campaign.
“The occupation, separation and annexation (of Texas by the US in 1845) were, from the inception of the movement until its consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union,” he wrote.
And more.
“The Southern Rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.(and) Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Grant declared himself bitterly opposed to the war, which he regarded as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
What will the unintended consequences of Russia’s creeping annexation of the two Georgian autonomous territories be, when it has its own fair share of legally recognized sub-republics, such as Chechnya? Will a Russian lieutenant in the 58th Army in the war against Georgia of 8.8.8 one day write his memoirs about a distant, footnote in history?
I truly hope so, because the wash of propaganda coming out of Moscow right now needs correction, even fifty years hence.
As for the Georgian response to the disaster, only time will tell if Mr Saakashvili can survive; there is sufficient animosity growing against him both domestically and even in western capitals that would suggest that he cannot remain in power much longer, particularly after the ‘formal’ departure of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russians have made it absolutely clear that they will not tolerate any military adventures that Tbilisi might want to mount, and short of going into a stand-off that might lead us into WW III, no western power, however friendly to Georgia, is going to challenge Moscow on the matter with military might. Like ‘Old Mexico’ being forced to live with the reality of first an independent and then US state of Texas across the Rio Grande River, future generations of Georgians are apparently just have to get used to living without the chunks of their ancestral homeland once known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Other paradigms, all evoking the concept of the ‘phantom limb’ syndrome experienced by amputees, are the Kingdom of Jordan’s loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem through war with Israel in 1967, and then final renunciation of all Jordanian claims to that territory a decade later, or Syria’s now very passive, even plaintive whisper that the province of Iskenderoon, which became Turkey’s province of Hatay by quasi-rigged plebiscite in 1938, come home to the motherland some day.
Other observers of shifting frontiers will have their own favorite lost-limb stories, but mine concerns the Scandinavian regions known as Jamtland and Harjedalen, forcibly ceded by Norway to Sweden following the 1645 Peace of Bromsebro, a loss that was not even papered over by the union between those Nordic states during the friendlier period of 1814-1905. To this day, the King of Norway (and indeed all naval officers) keep two buttons unbuttoned on their dress togs remembering those two, obscure chunks of fjord and mountain, and hoping for their eventual return.
I shared that anecdote with Saakashvili at a late night meeting last week; he almost seemed to smile.
By Nikolaus von Twickel / Staff Writer
In war, the saying goes, truth is the first casualty. In South Ossetia, it seems, truth has been battered so ruthlessly that it is virtually impossible to determine who fired the first shot.
It's even hard to figure out when it was fired.
Tbilisi and Moscow are accusing each other of planning the war well in advance of Aug. 8, when the Georgian army attacked the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali. Georgia says it was forced to attack after its soldiers in the area came under heavy fire from separatists.
With information and misinformation flying in all directions, it might take some time before the real facts are known.
In the meantime, theories are swirling about how Russia managed to set 2,000 tanks and 20,000 servicemen in motion in just 48 hours and why, on the eve of the war, the South Ossetian government sent hundreds of children across the border to Russia and 48 Russian journalists were camped out in a Tskhinvali hotel.
"There is no question that Russia had planned its measures long before," Georgian Reintegration Minister Temur Iakobashvili said in a recent interview in Tbilisi.
Russia echoes the accusation, countering that Georgia had long-planned the military operation.
The country's top mediator in the conflict, ambassador-at-large Yury Popov, said in an interview Wednesday that he had witnessed Georgian forces mobilizing on Aug. 7, one day before he was to hold direct talks with Iakobashvili in Tskhinvali.
Popov said he was returning from Tskhinvali to Tbilisi late that evening when, near the village of Tkviavi -- a few kilometers south of Tskhinvali -- he encountered Georgian units moving heavy weaponry into the conflict zone.
"I saw artillery howitzers and rocket launchers," Popov said.
Meanwhile, one photojournalist said Russia, having brought dozens of journalists into the breakaway region several days before heavy fighting erupted, appeared well-aware that major violence was imminent.
Said Tsarnayev, a Chechen freelance photographer, said he and a colleague came to Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 for a nature shoot and was surprised to find the town teeming with reporters from Moscow.
"When we checked in to our hotel, there were 48 other journalists," Tsarnayev said by telephone from Grozny. "I did not expect such a number."
When he suggested to Mikhail Zheglov, his editor at state news agency RIA-Novosti, that he go to South Ossetia to take pictures two weeks earlier, Tsarnayev said the editor told him: "'You know Said, maybe it is too early. Wait a little.'"
A man who answered the phone Wednesday at RIA-Novosti said Zheglov was on vacation and could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Journalists from national media outlets confirmed that they were in place in Tskhinvali when the fighting began but said Tsarnayev's suggestions of a conspiracy were ludicrous.
"This is not true," said Marina Perevozkina, a reporter with Nezavisimaya Gazeta who was staying at Tskhinvali's Hotel Alan at the same time as Tsarnayev.
Perevozkina said those following the events in Tskhinvali closely were aware of escalating tensions for some time and that it was by pure chance that she arrived a week earlier.
"I had asked back in July to go there but was not able to because our editor was traveling in the United States," Perevozkina said. "When [editor-in-chief Konstantin Remchukov] returned on Aug. 3, he immediately allowed me to travel. That is why I arrived just days before the war started."
Ruslan Gusarov, a North Caucasus correspondent for NTV television who covered events in Tskhinvali, also dismissed the suggestion that journalists knew anything in advance.
"We knew nothing," Gusarov said by telephone from the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala. "We decided to go to Tskhinvali as the situation heated up as any other professional news organization would. That is why I worked there a whole week before Aug 8."
Indeed, international media had noted a week earlier that the conflict was escalating. On Aug. 2, the South Ossetian government said sniper and mortar fire had killed six people in the region.
Some analysts said the simmering conflict received too little coverage in the West because the two sides trade gunfire almost every summer.
"The world only found out on Friday Aug. 8 [about the small arms attacks], while in Georgia it had been news for a week," said Mark Mullen, head of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International Georgia.
This was convenient for Russia because Moscow could concentrate on, and even control, the "who started it" debate," Mullen said in an interview in Tbilisi.
"That debate is a 'he said/she said' between Tbilisi and Moscow, each of which can be casual with the truth," Mullen said.
Iakobashvili, the Georgian Reintegration Minister, said the South Ossetian authorities' decision to send hundreds of children to Russia the weekend before the war clearly showed that Moscow was planning a military campaign well in advance.
The South Ossetian leadership, however, said the decision was linked to the fatal shootings.
Statements by captured Russian soldiers also point to a premeditated Russian campaign, Iakobashvili said.
"The pilots we captured reported that they were mobilized days before Aug. 8," he said. "And you do not set 2,000 tanks and 20,000 men in motion within 48 hours. To launch an assault from sea, land and air -- as Russia did against Georgia -- requires serious preparation."
Tbilisi says it decided to attack after separatists opened fire on all Georgian checkpoints near Tskhinvali and after it received intelligence that 100 Russian armored vehicles and trucks were heading into South Ossetia through the Roksky Tunnel.
Popov, the lead Russian mediator, said the claim is false and that "absolutely no tanks" had passed through the tunnel by the time Georgia attacked. "I double checked it," he said.
Moscow, however, does not deny that it had amassed forces in the North Caucasus for military exercises in July.
Perevozkina said she saw these troops with her own eyes. In her article published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Aug. 8 -- the day the war began -- she wrote that en route to Tskhinvali she saw columns of Russian military vehicles in North Ossetia moving along the road between the town of Alagir and the border post of Nizhny Zaramag.
"The military says it is continuing training exercises, but undoubtedly Russia is demonstrating its determination to protect its citizens in South Ossetia," Perevozkina wrote. "Even including an operation to enforce peace."
Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence agency, has said Moscow was aware of a strong possibility that Georgian forces might attack. Russia responded by mobilizing equipment close to the border but refrained from crossing over so as not to jump the gun, Stratfor has said.
One might wonder why, if this were true, Russia would have abandoned its peacekeepers in Tskhinvali, where up to 20 of them were reportedly killed in the Georgian attack.
There is also confusion about last-ditch diplomatic efforts between Tbilisi and Moscow.
Iakobashvili has said he proposed talks with Popov in Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 but that the Russian mediator could not make it because of a flat tire.
Popov confirmed that a tire on his Chevrolet Suburban was punctured 10 kilometers outside of Gori as he was traveling to Tskhinvali that afternoon.
"It took 1 1/2 hours until a new car arrived, and I continued on only after 6 p.m.," Popov said.
Popov denied, however, that there had been an agreement to meet Iakobashvili that day. "We both went to Tskhinvali on separate schedules," he said.
Popov said three-way talks scheduled for Aug. 8 in Tskhinvali were canceled after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili announced -- and subsequently broke -- a unilateral cease-fire.
"When I arrived [in Tbilisi] around midnight, the war had already started," Popov said.
Both sides have argued that the other consciously chose to escalate the conflict during the vacation season, when leaders for both countries were away.
The accusation cuts nicely both ways.
On Aug. 8, President Dmitry Medvedev was vacationing on the Volga, while Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in Beijing for the opening of the summer Olympics.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has said he had planned to go to Italy and that Georgian Defense Minister David Kezerashvili was on vacation that day.
Events in the months leading up to the war, however, indicated both sides had embarked on a dangerous road long before August got hot.
Moscow had been stepping up political and military support for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In April, Putin, then the president, ordered the government to establish closer trade, economic, social and scientific links with the two rebel regions.
The Kremlin also sent reinforcements to its peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia and repaired a rail link to the Black Sea province, which Tbilisi says was used to transport military hardware in the breakaway region.
Georgia, meanwhile, sought to bolster its military with U.S. and Israeli aid and angered Moscow with its aspirations to join NATO.
It sent spy drones over the breakaway regions that were shot down by Russian jets.
Human rights activists have also accused Tbilisi of orchestrating an attack in May on two buses carrying Georgians from Abkhazia's Gali region. The busses were hit with grenades and gunfire in the village of Kurcha, and Georgia blamed Abkhaz separatists.
But members of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee said in a subsequent report that they had uncovered evidence that Georgia had staged the attack.
The writing was on the wall already in early May, when independent defense analyst Alexander Golts wrote in The Moscow Times: "Nobody wants war, but both sides are doing everything to spark a military conflict."
I'd like to see the actual links to the ALR articles Xeeron, so that I can verify the dates. None of these comments, specifically address Pavel Felgenhauer's claim that "Russia started preparing for war after April, in order to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from entering NATO". When Hahn pointed out the silliness of Pavel Felgenhauer's argument, Pavel Felgenhauer turned into the Incredible Hulk and unleashed an Ad Hominem against Hahn involving Politkovskaya, and mocking Hahn for living in sunny California; and where does Pavel Felgenhauer report from? Is he a bold embedded reporter, giving us news from the frontline?
There are two sources here, that state that "Russia may have, or may not have started mobilizing" in April. That can be said about anything. "The Holocaust deniers may have, or may not have a claim." Furthermore, the articles seem to be published very early on, and express a general state of confusion. So in other words, the only article that directly addresses Pavel Felgenhauer's points is Hahn's, to which the only rebuttal is Felgenhauer's Ad Hominem, written in a manner unworthy of a peasant, much less a historian. Added with the rather sarcastic and untrustworthy tone towards Pavel Felgenhauer that is visible in most of the commentaries, and Pavel Felgenhauer's inability to respond with anything, other than a cheap Ad Hominem, I find that the deletion of Pavel Felgenhauer from this article benefits the article enourmously. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 03:33, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Were they used in this war? The thing is, I was going over the ORBATs for both sides, in scrutinizing details, and I couldn't find a single T-80. Furthermore, the only article I found on the T-80, talked about "scores of low-slung T-80 tanks", but I'm damn certain no more than twenty, if any, were used, so that article cannot be accurate. (Scores means forty or more.) Are there any actual sources that the T-80 was used? HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 07:56, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
I propose to remove the following sentence from the Evening of 7 August section:
"However, no conclusive evidence has been presented by Georgia or its Western allies that Russia was invading the country before the Georgian attack (the Russians claim it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation, however the troop movement occured at night, which was prohibited by the agreements regulating the status of Russian peacekeepers) or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, and the Georgian claim has received little support from Georgia's allies, the US and NATO."
The sentence adds nothing to the article, it is outdated and last but not least, it is false. There are currently 6 Russian and 1 Georgian sources cited after the previous sentence, confirming the move of Russian troops over the international Russian-Georgian border before the Georgian Army began its action in South Ossetia. Somebody can argue that the intercepted calls provided by Georgia aren't credible enough, but even Russia didn't put this evidence into question - Russia explained that the move was part of routine logistics or troop rotation, which of course wasn't supposed to happen during the night and just 2 months after the previous rotation took place (in May), as normally such rotations were agreed to happen every 6 months and in accordance with all sides (which didn't happen neither), etc.
As to the second part, you can refer to the last sentences of David J. Smith's chapter in The Guns of August 2008 - Russia's War in Georgia book (p.142):
"The bottom line is that Georgia reacted to Russia's escalation as any Western democracy would have done, using diplomatic means to lodge protests at every step. It sought the help of friends. It used international organizations. It became savvier about public relations. It put forward peace proposals for the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that should at least have been taken up as points of departure for negociations.
The reality is that the August 2008 war was neither provoked nor a product of miscalculation. It was initiated and waged by Russia for well-articulated geopolitical reasons. Georgia behaved diplomatically - perhaps too long."
You claim that there is no way that Venezuela's recognition comes as a result of the war. I differ. When Russians recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as Independent Republics, Medvedev was crystal clear that the main reason was Saakashvili's attack. So tell me Colchicum, do you honestly believe that had Russia not recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, miraculously Venezuela would? Venezuela's recognition stems from Russia's recognition, which is a direct result of the war. Had there been no war, there would be no Russian recognition. Had there been no Russian recognition, there would be no Venezuelan recognition. There's a clear and direct chain of events here, where one can say that, had there been no war, there would be no Venezuelan recognition. Hence Venezuelan recognition is a direct result, via a chain of direct events, that were all started by Saakashvili's failed attack on August 7, 2008. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 06:00, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
So if any other country recognizes South-Ossetia and Abkhazia in future they will be all piled up there? You can build up massive chain of events with that logic but infobox is not really a proper place to explain whole aftermath of conflict to every last detail. I dont see Kosovo's declaration of independence and 63 states that have recognized it in infobox of Kosovo War, although we could build very realistic chain of events there too.-- Staberinde ( talk) 12:54, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
First, Georgia didn't have 17,000 men. They had up to 17,000 men. The number is 12,000 to 16,000 men in South Ossetia and 1,000 men in Abkhazia. Second, titles are capitalized. Third, we do not talk about bombing runs in the Order of Battle. As I've argued earlier, the total number was up to 10,000 soldiers, and as such cannot be 11,700 soldiers. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 03:52, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=2008_South_Ossetia_war&diff=314480417&oldid=313933401
A ton of unsourced additions. Please add sources. -- Xeeron ( talk) 15:52, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Like Totally! HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 01:16, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Yes, I know there were 600 peacekeepers. There were also an addition 500 peacekeepers from the South Ossetian Force, making their number 3,000 total. But this information belongs in the Order of Battle, not in the infobox. And also 300 men from Battalions Vostok and Zapad fought. And 200 men from the 104th. And 1700 total from the 135th. But that information doesn't belong in the infobox. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 20:45, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Guys, I've watched this as an uninvolved administrator from a distance now for several weeks. The editing situation in this article is absolutely unacceptable. For as long as I've been able to follow, more or less throughout this whole year, there has been hardly a single day where the same small group of editors has not been revert-warring against each other on this article. I strongly suggest you agree on something like an editing moratorium for a while and instead sit down together to work out why it is that this toxic situation persists, and what to do against it. If this doesn't soon improve radically, I am thinking to remove the lot of you from this article for good, on both sides of the issue. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:02, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
I want to emphasise Offliner's point above: The previous full block of the article did not help at all. And despite the high occurance of reverts, this article has been constantly and considerably improved over the last months. Most contentious points that were heavily reverted have since settled down in a version acceptable to both sides (let me point to [4], where the lastest "edit war" occured, which now seems to have found a stable version). Furthermore, if you compare the edits of "regular" editors with those of "non-regular" editors at this page, you will find that those by non-regular editors are as bad or at times worse in terms of NPOV. The main issue at hand is improving the civility of the talk page discussions such that the talk page becomes an avenue of improving the article again. -- Xeeron ( talk) 14:03, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
Now that Xeeron was kind enough to offer us all the Jamestown Organization's side of the story, let's get the story of the actual people being present there, and not those critiquing form afar: http://cominf.org/en/archive/all/2008/8/8. HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 01:40, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
I think it's interesting how he calls Russia's Operation "Coerce Georgia to Peace" whereas the real name was "Force Georgia to Peace". Interesting, and totally "NPOV" verb change there. And Roy Allison publishes books with a certain Svante Cornell. Also, he's the same guy who said something about Russia and US not cooperating on Afghanistan, and I've yet to find Reality backing up that assertion. Thoughts? HistoricWarrior007 ( talk) 19:21, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
I propose we cut this from the intro:
The 1991–1992 South Ossetia War between Georgians and Ossetians had left most of South Ossetia under de-facto control of a Russian-backed internationally unrecognised regional government.[43][44] Some ethnic Georgian-inhabited parts remained under the control of Georgia. This mirrored the situation in Abkhazia after the War in Abkhazia (1992–1993). Already increasing tensions escalated during the summer months of 2008.
This is actually not about the 2008 SO war, and the intro is too large as it is. Plus, we have this information in the "prelude" section in the beginning of the article. FeelSunny ( talk) 15:03, 30 September 2009 (UTC)