from Peter Lavelle’S BLOG on russiatoday.com
South Ossetia – the bigger picture
In terms of substances, I have no doubt Russia will create a buffer zone within Georgian territory proper to protect South Ossetia. (That zone is called here the “zone of responsibility”).
This all means that Russian peacekeepers intend to stay for a very long time – beyond the legal and territorial demarcation of South Ossetia. And that presence does fall within legal arrangements signed by Moscow and Tbilisi in 1992 and 1999. This of course will be disputed and ignored by the Western commentariat and their politicians.
What does all this mean?
South Ossetia and Abkhazia are now free and will be free from Tbilisi’s control. And they won’t ever return to central Georgian control. This is the first decisive outcome of Tbilisi’s pre-emptive war.
This is refreshingly frank propaganda for the Russian side, courtesy of “Autonomous Nonprofit Organization TV-Novosti”; it is not a little triumphalistic. And, unless the Georgians are supported in fighting back, “LaValle” will no doubt be proven correct.
The IMINT & Analysis blog is less refreshing. Apart from the tendency of would-be intellectual giants to engage in tendentious critiques (oh boy, Ralph Peters is worth most of a whole blog post dismissing the entire entire press coverage of the Georgian crisis–mostly with the taint of “anti-Russian” bias–while pumping dear little “Sean O’Connor”‘s status as a world class pundit.
If you chose him as an example of obfuscation, Wretchard, you did good. I guess that was your point, maybe not.
The fact that Mr. O’Connor begins his piece asserting a timeline of August 8 to 11 already disqualifies his commentary as excessively limited in scope.
As far as the possibility of meaningful engagement with human events is concerned, something Mr. O’Conner is not evidently predisposed to endorse, I would say that it is certainly true that no one outside the Defense Ministries of Geogia, Russia, some of the Black Sea states and the USA is likely to know the exact timing of the Russian mobilization and the exact evidence available, certainly not Mr. O’Conners with his laudable but limited by imagination “open source intelligence” hobby. (yes, he really irritates me)
It is not difficult to imagine, however, that Georgia had many direct and indirect observation points to consider and that the ongoing mobilizations of the Russian fleet and the 58th Whatever could be read daily to ascertain with clarity what range of possibilities could follow. There are too many outward manifestations of the next state of a large unit just off maneouvres: leaves, supply trains, frepair and support facilities, personnel on leave, officers off and about on business, girlfriends visited, blah-blah-blah.
And no big-mouthed, headline happy journo is going to get jack s**t of this information outside of common rumor.
Meanignful engagement with God or current events most certainly is an option, allowing for immense uncertainty. The theory that Saakhashvili is a reckless gambler is so far outside reasonable consideration, I think (hah), that only premeditation with intent to prevail explains Moscow’s behavior.
That does leave us with Moscow’s gamble: do we dare back Georgia with arms and air cover in a guerilla war to recover her independence ?
Answer either way, NATO is still dead. Answer one way: Turkey and Iran divide Central Asia with Russia and the Euro-weenies get their comeuppance.
Answer the other way, and Turkey can provide the cornerstone of a Black Sea Treaty Organization which in turn provides the keystone for an arc of free economies from the Baltic to the Caspian.
Sneaky of old Putie to slip this in just now. Terribly inconvenient for us. And terribly inconvenient for him if his gamble fails.
