Saaki's War

After more than four years of threatening to re-occupy the separatist region of South Ossetia, on 7th August, 2008, Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili sent in his troops to seize the territory. At first his Blitzkrieg seemed a completew success. US-trained Georgian troops imitated the Croatian model of 1995 when Franjo Tudjman re-occupied the Serbian-controlled regions of Western Slavonia and Krajina. As in 1995, the inhabitants fled from their "liberators." Those who didn't risked death cowering from the Georgian bombardment in their cellars as Saakashvili's troops used the classic US "force protection" measures which the Croats had practised in Krajina: toss a hand grenade into any hole in the ground big enough to hide people in case among the elderly, women and children a potential resistance fighter is lurking.

Everything went to plan. When Russia tried to raise the issue at the UN on the night of 7-8th August, Georgia's allies America, Britain and France made clear that they would veto any resolution calling for a halt to the violence in South Ossetia. The West was happy for its carefully-trained Georgian troops to carry on their turkey-shoot chasing the outnumbered Ossetians across the Caucasus.

Russia had withdrawn its troops from Georgia proper and Putin's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, had intervened twice personally to assist Saakashvili to power in November, 2003, when he persuaded Eduard Shevardnadze to resign as president, and then to pressure the Adjaran regional predsident, Aslan Abashidze, to step down in 2004 and make way for a Saakashvili appointee.

But on 7th August, Saakashvili went too far even for a Russia which had withdrawn its troops over the last two decades from Eastern Europe and then bases inside ex-Soviet republics like Georgia while NATO "train-and-equip" units and "contractors" poured in.

Unlike Milosevic's Serbia, which abandoned the Serb refugees to their fate, Russia did not react passively to an attack which killed its passport holders and regular members of the Russian Army acting as peacekeepers in the region.

The Western establishment including its media elite was caught snoozing on holiday both by Saakashvili's rash invasion and the Russian response. Anyone who had followed this group's reporting on the Georgian president's aggressive response to challenges ought not to have been surprised that he acted on his many threats to the separatist regions. Nor should anyone be surprised that his posturing has produced a military debacle worthy of a Mussolini.