ULLMAN: Ending the Russian blame game

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By Harlan Ullman

OP-ED:

Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" is about how Europe stumbled into World War I and how gross misunderstandings led to catastrophic geopolitical endings. This August, the world is at war on many fronts. While the military news from Iraq is improving, conflict in Afghanistan and along the border with Pakistan is worsening. And Russia's intervention into Georgia, provoked or not, has revived memories of the Cold War and a new confrontation with a former adversary bent on challenging the West and the new democracies on its borders.

Throughout history, lessons are learned, forgotten or discarded and relearned at a far dearer cost in blood and treasure. Hidden in plain sight is the most obvious lesson of all. At the heart of virtually all strategic miscalculations and blunders is misunderstanding. Whether the United States is better or worse than others in its failure to understand the nature of conflicts in which it is involved is debatable. But the record is not good.

In hot wars, the last and perhaps only decisive victory was World War II. Korea was at best a draw. Vietnam was a clear defeat. The first Gulf War led to the second. It is arguable how Iraq will turn out. And in Afghanistan, it appears that success will take years if not decades to achieve.

In the one cold war we waged, the other side imploded. All sorts of claims as to how that victory was engineered persist. To many, the Reagan ploy to bankrupt the Soviet Union by trapping it in an arms race it could ill afford or sustain was the linchpin for success. To a few others, more substantive reasons caused the collapse of that "evil empire." We should rely on a deeper understanding of events rather than on conventional wisdom and use that understanding as the basis for policy and decisions. "Ready, fire, aim" never works. The first cause of the Soviet Union's dissolution was an irrational political system based on falsified, misleading or entirely wrong information about the strengths and weaknesses of the state. This was a house of cards, the political equivalent of corporate catastrophes such as Enron and Bear Stearns, whose strength rested on a colossal mismatch of assets and debt. Second, the leadership became a gerontocracy. Leonid Brezhnev remained in charge, incapacitated for years, as were his immediate successors.

When the old guard literally died off, Mikhail Gorbachev took over determined to save the Soviet Union from itself. He was disillusioned, as were many of his contemporaries, by the revelations of Stalin's crimes disclosed at the 20th Party Conference by General-Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in November 1956. He was then shocked by his service in the Politburo when he saw that the rot in the system was not isolated to a single or a few ministries. Mr. Gorbachev imposed "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring). The two unleashed the powerful centrifugal forces kept in check for over 70 years by powerful party and secret-police controls. The Soviet Union simply went poof.

Now with an energy-rich Russia awash in money, conventional wisdom concludes that Moscow is exploiting this opportunity to regain status and influence. Politely termed a "disproportionate response" in which Russia sent hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops into a relatively helpless Georgia, the theme of "The Guns of August" was rekindled in a region rife with conflict and ethnic passions.

In the United States, the two presidential candidates vied for having the harshest policies in response, criticizing President Bush for initially taking a more balanced position. In Russia, by an overwhelming number, people supported the intervention to save Russian lives. Many wished that the attack went further, even to deposing the Georgian government and replacing President Mikheil Saakashvili. Meanwhile, few sought to determine the facts and assign responsibility for what happened.

It may well be that Moscow used or provoked Georgia so that it could respond massively as a demonstration to the West that Russia was not to be trivialized. On the other hand, Georgia could have overreached believing that it had a NATO mandate and an implicit assurance of protection to take action against the separatists in South Ossetia. From an American perspective, it is important to understand what happened and who did what.

In wars that we lost or did not win, misunderstanding the enemy and the country in which we were fighting was a major factor in failure. We did not understand North Vietnam's will. We thought routing the Taliban in Afghanistan was winning. And we thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that democracy in the Middle East was an antidote to al Qaeda.

Before we designate Russia as a new Soviet Union, we had better understand the facts and the real conditions on the ground first.

Harlan Ullman is a columnist for The Washington Times.

Tony Blankley's column will resume on Aug. 27.