O’SULLIVAN: Lessons of a post-modern war

Seated in an open-air restaurant overlooking the River Mtkvari, enjoying a light lunch of mountain trout and Georgian salad, one finds it hard to believe that Russian tanks are only about 25 kilometers away - indeed may be even closer by the time the Turkish coffee arrives.

Tbilisi has few signs of being a capital city at war. National flags hang from many buildings. Newspapers have emphatic anti-Russian headlines such as “Peacekeepers go home.” Some pavement satirist has sprayed the features of Vladimir Putin on the pathways so pedestrians tread on his face.

But there are no bomb shelters; no one looks up anxiously at the sky when a plane is heard; and refugees head into the capital from South Ossetia for help rather than away from it in panic.

This post-modern invasion looks very different to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia 40 years ago - and in ways that bear examination:

In 1968, Soviet tanks reached the center of Prague. Today Russian tanks seem to be going back and forth around major Georgian towns, but they will not head straight for Tbilisi without an additional (and highly improbable) Georgian provocation.

In 1968, Czech leaders of the Prague Spring were rounded up and deported, reappearing years later as gardeners and furnace-men. Today Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, addresses large anti-Russian allies in the capital and hosts visits from Western leaders. In 1968 the Soviets simply imposed the regime change they wanted; today they are reduced to urging Georgians to replace Mr. Saakashvili, which only seems to strengthen him.

In 1968 the Soviet invasion was a “multinational” one drawn from the entire U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe; today, most members of the Commonwealth of Independent States have either criticized the Russian invasion or kept silent.

Soviet Russia in 1968 had to make a fairly simple calculation. It had to weigh preservation of its power over Eastern Europe against the value of political and economic detente with America. It chose the former, calculating that the United States would restore detente from a mixture of self-interest and moral weakness after an interval. And that is what happened.

Two weeks ago, the authoritarian Russia of Vladimir Putin had a much more complex problem to solve. Its war aims were to “punish” Georgia for seeking to join NATO (and for being noisily pro-West in general); to warn other ex-colonies such as Ukraine and Poland not to follow Georgia down the same path; to establish de facto control over all the energy pipelines going from Central Asia to Western Europe; and to translate its new-style geoeconomic power into old-style geopolitical power.

A 1968-style seizure of Prague and the “suiciding” of Mr. Saakashvili would have achieved these aims in short order.

But the Kremlin wanted these results without (a) damaging Russia’s access to Western markets and investment; (b) undermining good diplomatic relations with the West; (c) provoking Eastern and Western Europe into safeguarding their interests against newly-visible Russian threats, and (d) infringing international norms too blatantly. And it had to navigate between these contrary pressures under the gaze of a new international superpower: the international unsleeping 24-hour media.

Hence the Kremlin needed a pretext, a respectable war aim, and a satisfactory media “narrative” for its nice little war. Mr. Saakashvili provided the first by allowing the Georgian forces to respond to shelling with a full-scale military assault. The war aim was the defense of South Ossetia and its peacekeepers (which, however, theoretically limited the geographical reach of Russia’s advance.) Russia’s official media catered the third necessity by accusing the Georgians of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” - genocide justifies intervention under international law - while the fog of war was still thick on the battlefield.

If this narrative had stuck, Russia might have prevailed morally in diplomatic debate as well as militarily in the locality. But it was contradicted too plainly by the reality of a massive preplanned Russian invasion. And as the media uncovered more and more of this reality - symbolized by Russian forces moving out of some towns but digging in elsewhere on Georgian territory - so the boomerang effects of the Russian intervention began to appear:

c Poland signed the deal to accept U.S. missile defenses, and Ukraine offered its own interceptors for the missile defense system.

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