I agree wholeheartedly with Wretchard that we need to wait for the bits and pieces to trickle in. I don’t believe for a second that the Georgians, with their tiny force, are at all capable of defending against a classic Russian onslaught for long. There was no invisible line beyond which their tanks and aircraft miraculously died.
While I am positive that Western tactics and Western-style leadership may have made the Georgians more effective than they may have otherwise seemed, a force that size of Americans with American weapons and the same lack of any ability to resupply would not last long against the mass of the Russian Army, though the cost would be high.
The Russians have never shown any unwillingness to sustain heavy casualties.
A question that I am interested in the answer to is this; why did the Georgians find it necessary to resort to indirect fires in Ossetia? While I believe that they have a right to maintain their territorial integrity, why did they approach Ossetia as if it were a smaller nation and they were at war?
What was the political situation that developed in Ossetia? Why were the Ossetians so disturbed with Georgian rule that they felt the need to secede, and how much force were they using?
If the Georgians had used counterinsurgency tactics and strongly applied the rule of law in Ossetia, would the Russians have found the excuse they needed to intervene?
The Russians have demonstrated huge insecurity for years as the Western frontier has crept closer to their borders. As nations such as the Ukraine and former Eastern Bloc countries have streamed into the Western camp, the Russians have complained repeatedly.
The famous Russian inferiority complex, bred into the Russian psyche since the middle ages and subject to frequent outbursts since the adventures of Peter the Great, is still in play.
The Russians find themselves dubious master of their own region, much less the superpower that they were a scant few years ago. Never happy with their former Soviet Socialist Republic, and being handed a high-minded “reason” to intervene, they took it.
Before allowing NATO membership to a country such as Georgia, we must ask ourselves a simple question; are we willing to dance the dance if the music starts? Are we willing to back our principles with action? Principles without action are dead.
The Russians have accomplished a number of their ends as it is. Totally engulfing Georgia would be past the point of diminishing returns for them geopolitically; there was no invisible “line of death.” They simply accomplished what they wanted. They didn’t want to kill the baby… they just wanted to shake it hard enough to make it developmentally disabled. Had they wanted, they could easily take Georgia for their own. They just don’t want to pay the short term consequences.
