American Enterprise Institute

August 13, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

8:45 a.m.	Registration
9:00	Panelists:	Leon Aron, AEI
		Frederick W. Kagan, AEI Lt. Col. Bob Hamilton, U.S. Army
		Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, U.S. Army (Retired)
	Moderator:	Thomas Donnelly, AEI
10:30		Adjournment

Proceedings:

Thomas Donnelly:  Good morning everybody and welcome to the American Enterprise Institute.  My name is Tom Donnelly.  I work here as an analyst of military affairs and my role today is to act as referee and master of ceremonies. 

Our subject today is to try to assess what has just happened and what might happen in the near future, in Georgia, in the Caucasus, what Russia’s plans, ambitions, capabilities may be.  And we have assembled a really first-grade panel to address these subjects.  This is going to be, I would say, a really, first-rate, situational assessment.  I’ll just quickly run through the batting order with a brief introduction of the presenters and then we’ll get right to it.  I hope you have a little bit of patience.  We have four presentations to get through and each one is likely to be chock-full of important information and good analysis. 

My colleague at AEI, Fred Kagan, will start with a, sort of, on-the-ground update.  Fred is well known, certainly, from this institution and in this town but probably less so from his initial work as a Russian scholar and a student of Russian military affairs.  So, Fred has ranged far and wide but is, kind of, returning home to his original subject expertise, you might say. 

Fred will be followed by Ralph Peters, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, Foreign Area Officer, as he often said, a strategic scout in the later parts of his career.  Ralph is a longtime friend of mine and, particularly on his final assignments in the Army; he spent a lot of time traveling in the former Soviet States and in the Caucasus as well.  His recently published memoir, Looking for Trouble, provides excellent background to not only the crisis that is ongoing but the situation on the Russian periphery which has its roots in the breakup of the Soviet Union. 

To zoom in even a little bit tighter, our third presenter would be Lieutenant Colonel Bob Hamilton.  About ten days ago, Bob was in Tbilisi; he’s still an active duty Army officer but he was the Chief of the Defense Cooperation Office in Tbilisi.  So he spent the last couple of years working very closely with the Georgian military and can speak intimately about its capabilities, its leadership and so on and so forth.  So we’re going to really be able to look inside the Georgian military and the command structure. 

Finally, we’ll open up the aperture a little bit for Leon Aron, again, a long-time resident here at AEI, one of the town’s foremost Russia experts who will talk about the angle from Moscow, as it were.  So I’m going to just turn my microphone off at this point and turn it over to Fred.  So it will be quite a while before we get to questions but I think you’ll find this is worth it.

 Frederick W. Kagan:  Thanks, Tom.  Thanks to the other panelists for joining us on very short notice.  Thanks to all of you for coming on a very short notice.  It’s our job today to describe in detail the extremely unedifying spectacle of the empire formerly known as the Soviet Union beating heck out of a tiny little state on its frontier in detail.  Unfortunately, the Russians rather uncharacteristically did it reasonably well this time.  I’m not going to walk you through this hideous slide but I do want to make it clear that this didn’t come out of nowhere.  We definitely have been leading up to a crisis, to put it mildly, in this area for some time. 

The Russians, I would say, started the most recent round of inflaming the area in response to the Kosovar Declaration of Independence in February which the United States and many, but not all, of our European allies immediately recognized.  Almost all of the Commonwealth of Independent States countries did not recognize it.  Iran did not recognize it.  You can -- very interesting fallout pattern from that but the Russians almost immediately started turning their attention to this region. 

But the provocations in this region really only began, by the Russians, very dramatically, after NATO refused to contemplate inviting Georgia to join the alliance.  And almost immediately thereafter, the Russians unilaterally announced relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia that were everything short of official recognition.  Yes, there are definitely two sides to the equation and the media is quite right to point out that the Georgians have been adding their share of fuel to this fire.  But, in fact, I think you can look in this region and say, in this most recent iteration, the Russians have been the primary drivers. 

As the situation started to deteriorate, it looked very much as though the conflict was going to be focused in Abkhazia.  The Russians prepared for that. 

The Russian North Caucasus military district conducted exercises in mid-July 2008, and it’s my belief that during those exercises, which included flying elements of the 76th Airborne Division all the way from Pskov near St. Petersburg into this region with all of its equipment which is rather unusual in a training exercise, the point of the exercise was clearly to do the movement, to practice the short-notice movement rather than just to get the unit training in this area and then were moving it around.  It’s my belief also that the 58th Russian Army, which is the force based in Vladikavkaz, that is nearest to this area, conducted its basic contingency planning for this operation during these July exercises.  I’m not sure that the Russians meant for this to happen in quite this way at quite this time.  I have a feeling that they thought that it would start in Abkhazia and probably -- I don’t know they thought the timing was but I think they had the plans very much in place that allowed them to flex pretty quickly when they saw this start to go down.

 Just briefly, I’m going to talk a little about the Georgian Army.  The Georgian Army is very small.  There are five infantry brigades in the Georgian Army, of which, at the start of hostilities, one was in Iraq.  So there were effectively four infantry brigades, one light infantry battalion and one separate tank battalion and that’s it.  In all -- my colleagues can probably refine this but I’m going to guess that there are no more than 15,000 or 16,000 troops in those formations.  It’s a very, very small army.  We’ve worked hard over the years -- and again, my colleagues can put some more refinement on this -- to build the Georgian army out into a more capable force but it was a very, very small force and about 20 percent of its effective combat power was out of the country when this operation began.

This gives you the basic image of what we’re dealing with.  What happened is that the Georgian forces moved into South Ossetia on August 8th.  They did not conduct a very carefully prepared operation.  They did not think through very carefully what they were trying to do.  They did not attempt, as far as I can tell, to cut the line of communication between Russia and Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia.  Instead, they launched more or less of an encirclement followed by a frontal assault on Tskhinvali itself, in the course of which, reports suggest, that they pretty much leveled the city. 

Now, Georgians say the Russians leveled the city, I don’t know.  We could try to sort through that except the Russians occupy it.  So, I don’t think we’ll necessary get to the bottom of that.  But the net result was that you had a Georgian force attacking Russian peacekeepers, about 500 of them.  And according to the Russians, cutting them off in Tskhinvali but not laying the conditions to hinder the movement of Russian reinforcements from the North effectively. 

The Russians responded immediately by sending the 503rd Motorized Rifle Regiment from Vladikavkaz driving down through the Roki Tunnel to Tskhinvali.  Elements of that formation relieved the siege, if you want to call it that, of the Russian peacekeepers in Tskhinvali and began the counterattack that took the city.  Shortly thereafter, the Russians moved elements of the 76th Airborne Division from Pskov; this was the unit that had exercised in July.  They flew it to Beslan and road-marched it from there into Tskhinvali, as well.  And they also flew in elements of the 98th Airborne Division, which is based in Ivanovo in the vicinity of Moscow, to provide reinforcements, as well as elements of the 45th Spetsnaz Brigade, which had, shall we say, expertise in Grozny. 

We know that they significantly reinforced their air power in the region and I believe -- it’s hard to track this from open source -- but I believe that they sent the A-team of their fixed-wing aviation assets into the region armed, as they say, with precision-guided munitions, and I’ll come back to that in a minute.  They also sortied a flotilla of the Black Sea Fleet, organized around the guided-missile cruiser; I think it’s Moskva and that took station off the Georgian coast and began firing on Georgian ships and interdicting traffic.  They also reinforced -- they sent about 6,000 additional troops in Abkhazia; all of these to confront the massive Georgian juggernaut that was bearing down on nothing. 

Needless to say, the Russians drove the Georgians out of Tskhinvali pretty handily.  The Georgians retreated to Gori, which is their major military depot and also essential terrain because it lies astride the only road that connects Tbilisi with the sea. 

Here, it gets a little complicated.  There are a lot of reports, partially substantiated, that the Russians occupied Gori.  I’m not sure what that was all about.  It’s not clear to me what those forces were and how permanent they were and whether they were Russian or South Ossetian forces or whatever.  What is clear is that they bombed the heck out of Gori and a number of other targets and sent the Georgians scurrying away from Gori and the Georgians ultimately took up position just outside of Tbilisi in preparation to defend their capital. 

But the Russians didn’t end it there.  The Abkhazian forces, with significant Russian support, including Russian air strikes, attacked Georgian peacekeepers, who were stationed in the Upper Kodori Valley as part of the 1992 peacekeeping agreement, which is a tripartite agreement whereby all three sides had elements in there.  The Abkhaz, with no provocation in that vicinity at all that I can tell, simply launched an assault backed by Russian air power and drove the Georgians out. 

And then, something happened that I think requires a little bit of emphasis and explanation.  The Russians to this point - we can argue about Gori probably for those who are actually on the ground can tell us what ground truth was but I think that you could make a case that the Russians had a certain degree of plausible deniability about whether or not they had actually occupied Gori although it was clear that they had blown the heck out of it.  But the Russian Ministry of Defense publicly announced that the local commander in Abkhazia issued an ultimatum to Georgian forces stationed at Zugdidi, which is in unequivocally Georgian territory, demanding that they disarm and then subsequently occupied Zugdidi - and this you can find on the Russian Ministry of Defense website. 

It’s an interesting point the Russians tried to make the claim that the 300 terrified Georgians huddling in Zugdidi were somehow a threat to the 9,000 Russian troops with 350 armored vehicles that were in Abkhazia but I find that a rather pitiful excuse.  For some reason, which we may want to explore later, it seems to me that the Russians wanted explicitly to establish the fact that they had occupied Georgian territory and that they had a predicate and a basis for doing so.  I think that was an aim of this operation frankly. 

The Russians also conducted a significant air campaign.  And when you lay the locations of the strikes that the Georgian government and other media sources have identified on the lay down of the Georgian army this is what you see.  And it’s pretty easy to figure out which Georgian brigade is in Iraq.  The Russians didn’t bother to bomb the empty cantonments of the 3rd Brigade, which was deployed in Wasit province in Iraq.  That brigade came running back to Georgia.  We helped fly it back and it ended up fighting at Gori, or being at Gori and being bombed depending on your viewpoint, and then rushing back.  But this was clearly an operation that the Russians undertook for the strategic purpose of doing as much damage to the Georgian military, as a whole, as it possibly could. 

The Russians have been preening themselves on the accuracy of their guided missile strikes.  I don’t know about that but they certainly had a go at taking down the entire Georgian army and when you look at strikes and places like Batumi and even Tbilisi, it’s pretty hard to justify any of that on the basis of the operations that were going on in South Ossetia - by the way, all of these are flagrantly in violation of International Law.  There’s no legal basis that I can see for the Russians to be striking these targets in Georgia although they tried to establish a few. 

When you put it together with the ground attack, you can see that the net result of all of these is that the Russians have done probably enormous damage to the Georgian forces, which is an important point because it means that this peace agreement, which is being presented as a compromise and so forth is not in any way a return of the status quo ante in military terms.  The military balance in this area has been decisively shifted even, you know, it’s pretty decisively weighted in the Russian direction to begin with, now even more so.  And I suspect that probably most of the work the U.S. has done over the years to increase the capacity of the Georgian forces has been destroyed.

 The Russian military has a number of takeaways that it has highlighted which I think are very important for those interested in larger Russia policy and I just want to go quickly through them.  And these are all things, with the exception of the last two, that the Russians are explicitly preening themselves about in their own publications and websites that they were able to plan and conduct short-notice operations using forces from St. Petersburg all the way down to Georgia. 

It’s obviously a point that the Russians are very interested in making and it is an interesting point.  That’s a capability that -- it’s interesting to know that the Russians actually have.  That they were able to react with high quality ground forces within hours; now granted, they already had the plans laid out to do that but that’s okay.  Military organizations are supposed to have plans, pretty good.  They’ve made much, as I’ve said, of their precision munitions; we’ll see about that.  They made a big point of the fact that the units that went in were only volunteer units.  There were no conscript forces.  The Russian army is in the process of transitioning from a conscript to a volunteer force and they’ve highlighted the fact that these were volunteer units. 

This is also I think for the Russians a proof of principle of the idea of the volunteer force.  And I think that, from the standpoint of internal Russian military dynamics, was important.  This was a rapid, decisive operation for the Russians.  Now, granted, it was shooting fish in a barrel, but even so, remember they’d made Grozny look really hard.  So it’s not a gimme that they could do this sort of thing well.  They actually did this pretty well.  The Russians, definitely, are making a point that they destroyed what they are characterizing as a relatively well-armed, well-equipped, well-trained U.S. proxy.  I think they’ve got tired of all the years of watching American equipment destroying Russian equipment.  So now, they’re enjoying watching Russian equipment destroying [American] equipment.

 The last two points, the Russians are not explicitly making but I think that they’re significant.  I think that this will be held up in the Russian military as an event that helps get by the Chechnya pain.  This was to Chechnya I think as Desert Storm was to Vietnam.  And there was also a very coordinated and effective preplanned cyber attack that the Russians launched in conjunction with this operation.

A couple of other points that I want to highlight, these are all things that Russian official spokesmen and leaders have asserted in the course of this operation or else demonstrated and asserted that Russia has the right to respond to conflicts within South Ossetia and Abkhazia by attacking Georgian territory outside of those areas.  They’ve explicitly laid out that right, that Russia has the right to use its own military force outside of its borders for the purpose of defending the dignity and lives of Russians citizens, which is an interesting principle.  They say, wherever they are, wherever they’re located doesn’t matter, Russian military can be used against any state to defend the lives and dignity of Russian citizens.  That’s a pretty chilling message to any of Russia’s neighbors - also a violation of International Law. 

They have also asserted that Russian Federation law extends to cover all Russian citizens even those that are not within the boundaries of the Russian Federation.  And since they’ve been handing out passports like candy in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and elsewhere, that’s also a very disturbing precedent.  The Russian attorney general has explicitly said that Russian Federation law can be used to bring charges in Russian court against non-Russian citizens who have committed crimes not on Russian territory if their actions are against the interest of the Russian Federation. 

And so, there was an investigative commission that has been set up and it’s purpose, I think pretty clearly, is to collect evidence and then charge Saakashvili and some of the other Georgian leaders not with genocide - they’re going to do that too - but with mass murder under Russian Federation law, in a Russian Federation court.  And they have also tried to establish the principle that Russian military forces can take preemptive action, including ground occupation, and that’s what I think the Zugdidi occupation was all about, to protect themselves from any possibility of danger that might be proposed to Russian forces from other troops not on Russian soil and not on disputed soil.  That’s also an interesting extension of the principle of preemption. 

What are the Russians trying to do, very briefly?  I think that the Russian objective is to force Saakashvili from power.  I think that they never had in mind taking Tbilisi.  I think they’re going to try to do that through a variety of legal-political diplomatic means including repeated statements that they will not negotiate with Saakashvili which probably, I think, will shortly be joined by an in absentia ruling that he’s guilty of crimes and the claim that he is a war criminal.   All of which the Russians will use to say that they can’t negotiate with him.  Without negotiations, they’ll have an excuse not to withdraw their troops and so forth and so we can see where that goes.  This is, in a certain sense, I think, an attempt to repeat the Milosevic play. 

Obviously, they’ve made it clear that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not going to be rejoining Georgia.  That’s not going to happen and presumably will be annexed.  They have explicitly been trying to tell everybody that investing in pipelines in the Caucasus is a very bad idea and you really better just let this stuff flow through Russia because Russia will keep it safe.  They’ve explicitly been telling everybody that, remember if Georgia had joined NATO, they’d be killing Americans by now.  So it’s a good thing that didn’t happen and we’d better not take Georgia or anyone else into NATO. 

And they’re also working to separate the U.S. from Western Europe and our Western European allies are helping in this when Sarkozy interposes himself to bring a list of compromise positions that are in fact the Russian ultimata, unabashed and without any change, to Saakashvili and ask him, in the name of the European Union, to sign.  I would say that Sarkozy is helping separate Europe from the United States as well.  So on that happy note, I will turn over to Ralph.

Ralph Peters:  I think Fred did a superb job of laying down the basic situation in great detail and I’m going to pull the camera back for a wider angle shot and then narrow it down again.

First of all, I do understand that President Sarkozy has landed in Paris, holding in his hand, a piece of paper, guaranteeing peace in our time.  The Russians, on whom I have wasted far too much of my life, are drink-sodden barbarians who occasionally puke up a genius. And we should make no mistake.  Vladimir Putin is one such genius.  As this brilliantly planned and executed operation illustrates, he is the most effective leader in the world today, certainly of any major country.  No one else comes close.  Obviously, the ruthlessness helps.  He is just uninterested in international law, precedent, et cetera.  And for now for Russia, he is great.  In the long run, he may be a very negative factor for Russia, but for now, he is riding very, very high. 

And if you contrast that with President Bush, who looks strikingly like Jimmy Carter when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, it’s just tragic.  Russia invades, in a calculated, unprovoked aggression, invades a U.S. ally and our president goes to a basketball game.  Ladies and gentlemen, that is not an efficient diplomatic response. 

Now, there are only two points, one relatively major and one minor on which I diverge from Fred’s analysis.  I look at this as a former soldier and also as a former Intel officer, and to me, it is absolutely clear that Putin -- and of course Putin is still “the man,” Medvedev is the straight man in this duo -- Putin got his war exactly, exactly when he wanted it.  It was brilliantly stage managed.  And think of it, he got in on the opening day of the Olympics while Europe - meaning NATO, the EU, everybody else - is on summer vacation, just absolutely astonishing.   And of course, he also had the unexpected fringe benefit of having the American warlord, Barack Obama, on a beach in Hawaii, so he was perfectly safe. 

Seriously, two things, well three, apart from our government’s pathetic, embarrassing response to this active, unprovoked aggression; two things just horrify me.  I fear my reaction to this has been so emotional; it’s really a bit uncharacteristic even though I sometimes put it on emotional performance behind a microphone.  But it troubles me, first of all, obviously the aggression, I shall come back to that, but the other thing that appalls me is the way the Western media and every major establishment outlet in the United States bought instantly into Russia’s line that Georgia started this, by invading North Ossetia, that Georgia were the aggressors. 

Russia’s been throwing around the word genocide, that the Georgians were doing genocide against the North Ossetians.  I don’t know of one challenge to that.  And driving in here from my lair in the Piedmont this morning, I was listening to BBC, and the BBC were talking about this massive Georgian public relations machine and poor Russia did not know how to handle it. 

I’m serious.  It will be on the net.  Putin’s Russia has inherited the massive apparatus and the techniques and talents of propaganda from the old Soviet Union.  And he’s revitalized it and now it’s in cyberspace as well. The Russians were out very, very quickly with their message and it doesn’t matter.  All the channels and cable news shows, they’re all talking about Russia’s response to Georgia’s actions.  Ladies and gentlemen, this was absolutely ludicrous. 

Now I could tell you that Fred laid it out very well, but even in addition to that, from the end of July there are additional provocations.  And by the way as an aside, this was so well stage managed that I am convinced that the Russian Security Services have a source very close to President Saakashvili who has been telling them which way the decisions were going.  But the provocations were carefully staged because the Russians knew that pushed past a certain point, President Saakashvili had to respond.  I mean they were shelling and attacking, I hate to say Georgia proper because it’s all Georgia proper, but beyond the borders of North Ossetia and he had to respond politically.  But also Putin is a former KGB man and he must have been a brilliantly good one because his assessment, and of course that of his staff, of how the West would react, how the Western media would react and how President Saakashvili would have to react, was brilliant. 

I mean Saakashvili isn’t the right guy, in the right place, at the right time.  I described him yesterday to someone as an Iraqi on methamphetamines, but nonetheless, Georgia is not to blame.  I was there almost 20 years ago in the Caucasus in Georgia when this was all happening.  Initially, when the Russian Security Services, as the Soviet Union came apart, were fomenting, really starting and funding and developing all these separatist movement.  And just as another aside, Putin, again unchallenged and Medvedev and company and Lavrov, they’re making big case that, well, you know Kosovo, look at Kosovo.  They have the right to be free, so do the Abkhaz, who are gangsters, and the North Ossetians.  Well, I would say we should actually consider that and by that logic, Chechnya, Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkar Republic, et cetera, they should all have and be able to have their internationally supervised plebiscites on seceding from Russia or leaving Russia.  But again, I’m troubled by the fact that none of these comes up in the media, none of it. 

Now, to move back to what Russia did and how artfully.  Look, anyone who served in the military and risen above the rank of Private can tell you -- I keep wanting to say the Soviets, but the Soviets had more restraint.  The Soviets actually cared more about world opinion than Putin does.  But the Russian military, even though Putin has poured oil and gas revenues into it, is still a relatively lame organization and they are strategically brilliant in this operationally but tactically very weak but certainly could overpower and they overpowered the Georgians. 

As Fred alluded to, look, the Russian Army, the active forces have over 6400 main battle tanks, the Georgians have 81.  Those are not good odds, but if you look at -- when we first saw the first reports, it was basically a task-organized brigade rolling over the Caucasus to rescue beleaguered North Ossetia -- I keep saying North, I’m sorry South Ossetia, I apologize.  South Ossetia, in all those remarks -- but as they roll over, you can’t even do that from a standing start, especially with Russian readiness rates.  Now, they’ve had a huge exercise, Kavkaz 2008.  They’ve been preparing for months as Fred said. 

And by the way, our intelligence systems had a curious take on this.  Our intelligence system is watching this build-up for months, for about a year.  They knew a confrontation was coming but they utterly missed exactly when because analysts see what they’re conditioned to see.  And they had the attitude, well it won’t happen on summer vacation.  It won’t happen on the Olympics, which was exactly when, of course, Putin planned it.  But the first night, just getting that one brigade from the 58th Army over the mountains, man they were ready to go on a moment’s notice.  And that is not characteristic of Russian or any other military organizations. 

And then within 24 hours, when you saw the magical appearance of a squadron from the still-broken down Black Fleet off Georgia’s coast.  I mean they sent the best they had, to see these hundreds of air sorties against obviously preplanned and prescheduled targets.  And then the sea, the better part of -- it looks like two divisions’ worth of troops pour across the mountains and into Abkhazia in the West.  This was a massive organization. 

The United States military, even if we were all back from Afghanistan and Iraq, we could not have done this on 24 hours’ notice.  It would have taken us a week or weeks.  We could have gotten airborne brigade out there quickly, the Navy could have got, you know, we could have got planes in the air.  But from military perspective, this was carefully planned.  Of course, I know militaries plan for contingencies but it’s not just the planning.  They were obviously ready; the guys are in garrison, they’re trained up, the orders are there.  They’re ready to jump on the tanks and go.  They are ready to jump on the planes and fly.  And it is simply undeniable.  There is, again I’m repeating myself, there’s absolutely no way any military in the world, let alone the Russian military, could have done this within 24 hours.  The military universe does not work that way.

Now to get down to just a few specifics, another point in which I disagree with Fred, we’ll see what finally emerges from it.  Again, strategically brilliant.  The Russians have always been great strategic planners.  Operationally, they did well.  They got the forces across the mountains, got the planes in the air, got the ships out there.  But when I looked at the film clips, watching the flight profiles, watching how the forces move, the Russians sent in their very best and they were still clearly ragged.  Now the Russians are not above terror bombing and I’m sure there was some of it. 

But many of those hits on apartment buildings in Gori and elsewhere were misses.  Their air force, I’m sure that right now Vladimir Putin and company are furious with the Russian Air Force because despite having their latest, their best aircraft and precision munitions, these guys were missing target after target.  And eventually they got the big radar station on the hill outside Tbilisi, for the international airport, they eventually got them. 

But they were trying over and over again to hit the pipelines, couldn’t hit them.  They’re going in after railroad stations and Fred showed you that line, that crucial highway from Tbilisi to Poti; it’s Georgia’s lifeline to the world.  Parallel to that is the sole rail line.  Parallel to that is the old gas pipeline.  So, they’ve been trying to take these things out and they haven’t been able to do it.  They haven’t been able to hit.  They’ve been able to hit aerial targets.  In some cases, they’ve hit individual Georgian vehicles but their pilots are clearly, they don’t have the flight hours.  They’re still not as skilled and they’re flying scared.  They don’t fly like they’re emotionally hardened for combat.  They’re dropping their payloads and getting out of there. 

Now, this is getting a little far down in the weeds but it matters.  It matters because the point is Russia’s military is still a blunt instrument.  This is not a surgical strikes military, and again as to the issues specifically of Gori, the Russians don’t want to occupy Gori.  They want to make it uninhabitable or at least unattractive to any returnees.  What we’re going to have trouble, what the world’s going to have trouble getting him off of is that key, just north of Gori, the road, rail and pipeline there. 

And the Russians, even if they formally make a show of pulling their troops out, they’re going to leave Russian mercenaries, security service employees, Cossacks, soldiers in mufti as South Ossetians, as the local volunteers.  And there is simply no way that Georgia is going to recover South Ossetia or Abkhazia.  They’re gone. 

The question now is whether Georgia can survive as a viable state.  Russia is going to do everything it can to ensure it becomes and remains a puppet.  So this struggle -- even were the shooting to stop today, of course it hasn’t stopped.  The Russians are still shelling and they’ll always have an excuse.  And poor Sarkozy, I had better hopes for him, but the Europeans have failed as well.  I mean we failed miserably.  Miserably. This is a last remark.  Let’s get on.

Yes, I agree with Fred, the Germans blocking a plan to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO; that was the green light for Putin to do this.  But for our part -- unlike Michelle Obama, I’m rarely ashamed of my country.  But I will tell you, I have been ashamed at our lame response.  I don’t think we should be looking for a nuclear confrontation with Russia, of course, but again, my image would always be the president going to a basketball game and flirting with the volleyball team, et cetera.  Look, we’ve done this before.  The message we’ve sent to our allies yet again – would-be allies, would-be clients, is America won’t come through for you - especially if you don’t have oil or gas. 

We did this to the Hungarians in 1956.  We encouraged them to rise up and they rose up and we did nothing.  In 1991, with the Shia in Iraq, at the end of Desert Storm, we encouraged them to rise up and they did and we let Saddam’s troops slaughter them.  And we have been cheering Georgia on, wild and wooly, free wheeling, democracy, go get them.  In the pinch, we failed them utterly.  So to quote T.S. Elliot, “In my end is my beginning and vice versa,” we are faced with a resurgent major power, not superpower but a resurgent major power with imperialist megalomaniacal ambitions led by the most effective, and I would argue, the most brilliant leader in the world today, outclassing everyone I can see.  Ladies and gentlemen, I find this terribly reminiscent of the 1930s.

Thomas Donnelly: You’re up.

Bob Hamilton:  As Tom said, I came out of Georgia about a month ago.  I was there for 2 years, in the U.S. Embassy, as the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation and for those of you not familiar with what ODCs do, our job is to build capacity.  So what I would like to do is just give you a quick overview of the pre-war state of the Georgian Armed Forces, what I see, my personal opinion, as an overview of some of their strengths and weaknesses and also talk about some of the capacity building programs that the U.S. executed there. 

As Fred said, the Georgian Armed Forces total about 30,000.  They were in the process of expanding from four brigades to five when this happened.  Their brigades are stationed generally East-West across the country.  The fourth brigade is just outside of Tbilisi here.  They were actually in training to go to Iraq when this happened.  So they were pulled out of their Iraq pre-deployment training and apparently thrown into the fight.  The first brigade moved recently, about a year ago, and they’re headquartered at Gori.  The Georgians had built them a new base there, which has apparently been bombed pretty heavily by the Russians. 

The bulk of first brigade was serving in Iraq when this happened, 2,000 of their soldiers.  So the only thing they had left at Gori were the tank battalion and the artillery battalion, which were not needed in Iraq and did not go.  Out at Kutaisi here is where the third brigade was.  The second brigade was at Senaki and then there’s a little town called Khoni, also up in Western Georgia, where the fifth brigade, the units of the fifth brigade that had already been created; again they are in the process of creating that brigade.  That’s where they were stationed.  They have a Special Forces group that was about 360 strong stationed in the vicinity of Tbilisi. 

Their major airfields were at Marneuli and Kopitnari, Marneuli being kind of south of Tbilisi and Kopitnari out west near Kutaisi.  Those were bombed very early in the war.  Their air force consisted of an SU-25 squadron with about nine aircraft.  The SU-25 is essentially ground-attack aircraft.  It doesn’t really have any defensive counter-air capabilities.  There was very little that Georgians could do against the Russian attack aircraft.  They had a helicopter squadron of MI 24 Hind attack helicopters; MI-8 and MI-17 lift helicopters.  And then they had a UH-1 squadron that the U.S. was involved in, donating the UH-1 and assisting them and building that squadron.  Those were stationed mostly at Alekseevka which is just outside of Tbilisi.  It is right next to the international airport, there is a military side on the inside. 

The Georgians really had no navy to speak of, no real naval capability on the eve of this war.  Their major navy base is out in Poti but the navy can rarely get underway, in any significant fashion.  So they were obviously not a threat and were unable to really get out to meet the Russians when the elements of the Black Sea Fleet showed up. 

So U.S. capacity building efforts in Georgia started in a meaningful way in about 2002 with a program called Georgia Train and Equip Program that ironically was meant to give the Georgians the capacity to go up into the Pankisi Gorge, where the Russians claim that there were Chechen rebels resting, recuperating, training and then crossing back into Russia to fight in Chechnya.  The Russians had attacked the Pankisi Gorge a couple of times. 

The U.S. decided to embark on this capacity building effort.  The Georgians at that time were so incapable that they could not even effectively police their own sovereign territory.  It wasn’t that they didn’t have the will to get up into the Pankisi and rip these guys out; it was that they didn’t have the capability.  So GTEP, the Georgia Train and Equip Program, built that capability.  The Georgians went up into the Pankisi and cleaned it out.  The Pankisi has been peaceful and clean for years.  In fact, the Embassy does humanitarian assistance projects up there now.  It’s a benign environment. 

So that removed one of the points of contention in the Georgia-Russia relationship.  Later after these units were trained through GTEP, the Georgians offered to send them to Iraq and then two more brigades were trained and partially equipped by the U.S. and rotated through Iraq at about the battalion level.  Until the spring of 2007, the Georgian contingent in Iraq was about 850, the bulk of them, 550, were in Baghdad and then they also had a small group of about 300 out in Baquba, Diyala province. 

In early 2007, the Georgians asked to participate in the U.S. surge.  In other words, we had our surge brigades, they asked to, not only increase their contingent from 850 to 2,000, but agreed to take on whatever mission the U.S. thought was appropriate, were very explicit to us that there were no national caveats, save one.  And that is that the Georgian troops would be under U.S. command-and-control, were very explicit that the rules of engagement they would use would be U.S. rules of engagement meaning they could go out and do full-spectrum counterinsurgency operations.  So the decision was made to give them Wasit province.  They’ve been in Wasit province now for about a year until last weekend and they were air-lifted out to come home.  And that was part of the agreement when they deployed that if there was a national emergency the U.S. would assist them in getting back. 

So the U.S. capacity building programs in Georgia have -- we have heard, and I completely agree, this was not a fair fight.  It was never going to be a fair fight.  But the U.S. capacity building programs in Georgia and the U.S. military effort in Georgia has been designed to build deployable capacity for the Georgians to participate in coalition operations, to develop counterinsurgency and, to some extent, counterterrorism skills. 

It was never designed, it was by design not designed, to prepare them to fight a full spectrum, maneuver war against country like Russia.  In fact, the U.S. intentionally made the decision not to train or equip their artillery, their armor or their attack aviation forces for two reasons.  One, those were not needed in Iraq or Afghanistan and second it was seen to be too provocative.  So our capacity building efforts did a great job in preparing the Georgian military to deploy and fight alongside U.S. and coalition allies.  They’ve done a great job in doing that.  They were the third largest contributor to the Iraq mission after the U.S. and the U.K. And they are seen both in Iraq and at home as having good individual and small unit tactical skills.  These guys are good soldiers. 

At the battalion and brigade level and higher, they are probably less good and they’re less good still at a maneuver warfare, high-intensity conflict, which was what they’ve been faced with.  They just had not been trained in any meaningful way to do that.  They have a very young military leadership.  After the Rose Revolution in 2003-2004, not only in the Ministry of Defense, throughout the Georgian government, essentially everybody over 40 was gone.  The advantage of that was the old Soviet mindset was gone.  The disadvantage obviously is the experience was gone. 

And so you’ve got a Minister of Defense who turns 30 this fall, I think in September.  The Chief of the Joint Staff is 37-ish and he came over from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  So his background is as a Ministry of Internal Affairs Special Forces Commander.  Then he came into the MOD Special Forces and then he was made the Chief of the Joint Staff.  The deputies are three, all of whom are competent and good guys but young, mid-30’s, early to mid-30’s most of them.  Brigade commanders are often majors and lieutenant colonels that are late 20’s or early 30’s.  So you have a very young and inexperienced leadership. 

Command and control was, I would say, unevenly effective. They are in the process of fielding radios and wireless digital voice and data command and control systems.  They are not encrypted.  They are commercially encrypted.  Commercial encryption is probably pretty easy for the Russians or anybody else to get around.  They don’t have a national military command center, something that appears to have been pretty obvious during this fight.  They have an air operations center which, I think as Ralph said that the Russians were finally able to destroy the radar on top of the hill, but they don’t have a national military command center. 

As I said, little to no naval capability.  They do not have an integrated air defense network.  They have some air defense systems.  They had actually come to the U.S. recently and asked for assistance in developing an integrated air defense network but that is a multiyear, multi-multimillion dollar effort that really hadn’t started when this war started. 

They really, at this point, don’t yet have an effective land forces command; in other words a level between the brigades and the joint staff.  The old Soviet model, the combat units, the operational units reported directly to the general staff.  The Georgians have moved away from that model and had created land forces command, but land forces command doesn’t really have the capability to command and control their maneuver units, their brigades in combat and what follows from that is that the units or Command and Control probably straight from the Chief of the Joint Staff, little to no capability to conduct joint operations.  They were in the process, as I said, in fielding a command and control system that would allow their services to talk to each other but I doubt if there was any meaningful air-ground communication between Georgian units during this campaign. 

And the final thing I’ll say is that there really is no approved Georgian Armed Forces doctrine.  It’s in development.  It’s under development.  Right now, it’s kind of an amalgamation of hold-over Soviet doctrine particularly, I think, if you look you’ll find their attack, aviation, their armor and artillery, since the U.S. hasn’t really touched those units in any meaningful way, probably operate more on a Soviet model than not. 

Whereas their infantry units, their reconnaissance units, increasingly, their special forces, have adopted Western or U.S. doctrine.  In some cases adopting the doctrine just means taking a U.S. field manual, translating it into Georgian and following it but there is no overarching Georgian Armed Forces doctrine that would allow them to operate in any sort of way that would have allowed them to resist what came at them from Russia.  So, that’s all I will say for now.

Leon Aron:  Tom, let me anticipate.  As an occasional host and moderator of these things, I know that the host and the moderator looks to the last speaker to be brief, brief, brief, and entertaining.  I’ll try to parcel it out that way under ten minutes.

Thomas Donnelly:  I was not going to actually ask you to be brief.  I do think this is work.

Leon Aron:  Okay.  Can I take it back?

Thomas Donnelly:  No.  Nope, having thrown it down you’re obligated to your limit though but if you would tie together some of these strands, please do so.

Leon Aron:  Let me just mention a few points about what this war revealed and, indeed, that will be tying a lot of things, particularly in the first two speakers’ points.

First, Vladimir Putin’s role.  We all suspect that, some of us stronger than others, that he is the one who’s calling the shots but it was -- until now, there was a sense that he is kind of a great cardinal, that he is indeed the man behind the operations and Russian politics but we needed a proof.  Now, not only did we get the proof, not only it happened de facto but it also happened in the most insolent way, if you could put it this way.  It was played up by the Russian media in a way that leaves absolutely no doubt that Medvedev was the figurehead and Putin, in fact, both prime minister and the president for all intents and purposes.  And I’ll tell you a bit later why that’s important, and here we will get into what it means for Russian domestic politics and foreign policy.

Well, first of all, he flew directly to Vladikavkaz, which is the capital of North Ossetia, from Beijing.  Now, in Beijing, of course, he was, as far as I could tell, the only prime minister.  The rest were heads of state.  The rest were presidents.  So, that alone was a very interesting statement. 

After landing in Vladikavkaz, he essentially, and as far as Russian media are concerned, acted as commander-in-chief and as spokesman for the government of Russia. He was shown talking to the military leaders in Vladikavkaz; he was shown mingling with the refugees and sort of encouraging them, walking around in short sleeves; he visited the wounded in the hospital; and of course -– two most important points –- he was shown on Russian television instructing Medvedev as to what needs to be done and he also was the one, not Medvedev, he rebuffed the U.S. criticism of the operation. 

Now, there is a very witty, or in this case, sarcastic, probably would be a better word, Russian female journalist by the name of Yulia Latynina and she pointed out that while President Putin, in effect told or was telling at that time, that he was telling President Bush in Beijing, that the Russians are about to invade or had invaded, President Medvedev was taking a motorboat cruise down the Volga River.  And she said that perhaps he should continue to take these cruises for the rest of his presidency or go directly to the Bahamas and retire right away.  So this is now the view of the real structure of power in Russia. 

Now, in addition to this sort of geographic division of labor, there was also a thematic division of labor, which is that while President Putin was talking to the leaders of the two states that the Russians fear and therefore respect, the most which is China and the United States, all that Dmitri Medvedev got to do is to speak to the President of France, a country, which for all love that the Russians have since 1812, 1813, hardly inspires, sort of, a tremor of horror in the Russian hearts.  Now, what that means of course, this is not just a trivial -- although valuable insight into the Russian division of labor, it shows that (a) the Constitution is a sham, very vividly, that the elections were a sham, that we now have witnessed that the whiff of liberalization that some of us perceived in the occasional speeches of Medvedev, the notion of the rule of law, the freedom of the press, the anti-corruption drive that he seemed to imply, are all now buried under the rubble of Gori, if you could put it that way. 

There is to the extent that there were liberals and hardliners -- and again, as somebody pointed out, we now are forced much, certainly to my chagrin, to resort to the Cold War criminological language because the structure of the government is just as a PAC now.  To the extent that there were liberals and hardliners, doves and hawks, this is a crushing setback for liberals such as they were in the Russian government, which incidentally is the law of Russian history.  Every war, especially victorious war, in Russian history, the first victim of that war was the domestic liberal reforms.  Since the 16th century under Ivan the Terrible, since the taking of Kazan, the first victim is the domestic modernization and liberalization.

Secondly, the outcome of this war and, in fact, how it was undertaken and, I fully agree, it was an a la carte war, it was a war that Russia chose to fight regardless of how it started, chose to fight rather than was forced to fight, brings us to the debate among the specialists on Russia as to what sort of regimen we have.  And I think from what I’ve just mentioned about the role of Putin and thereof of Putinism -- and I’ll describe a few features of that –- since that has emerged victorious from this war, there is no doubt that Russia is now a fully authoritarian state but there are different kinds of authoritarian states.  There are authoritarian states that are relatively quiet, that they are relatively content to be dealing just with the domestic agenda. 

Again, from the mid of 16th century, from the emergence of the Russian modern state, the Russian authoritarians was not that type of regime.  For whatever reason, and this is a fascinating issue and we could all debate it, but whatever reason, a Russian authoritarianism had always been interwoven with war-making.  It knew its share of victorious wars - Richard Pipes undertook it once right?  - it was the 200 victorious wars.  There were 30 wars that were not victorious but one way or another, it, for some reason, is a restless authoritarianism, it’s a war-mongering authoritarianism.  It could never sit still inside its own borders and it probably has something to do with geography and the imperial legacy and whatnot; that’s a separate issue.

So, before this war started, there were already very interesting elements of this type of outward-looking authoritarianism.  Let me just mention them very briefly.  It was the institute of the national leader, which Putin built up, regardless of what position anybody holds, there is the national leader, that is the focus of the national aspirations, that is the leader in wartime and peace.  And that, of course, the war proved that regardless of his subservient position, constitutionally, he could be fired in fact by the President at any moment, that national leader is Vladimir Putin.

Secondly, there were very distinct propaganda themes of lost and imperial nostalgia.  You may recall Putin’s calling the demise of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century.”  The idea of the besieged fortress, Russia, very, very prominent of the past few years; a country surrounded by the cunning and ruthless enemies on every side that are seeking to dismember it and overthrow its regime and the plotting.  And not only Russia is surrounded by enemies, it is also surrounded by the Trojan horses, one of which of course is Georgia. 

The labeling of the political opposition “the Fifth Column” started with Vladislav Surkov but in Putin’s -- one of his memorable phrases, he compared them to the jackals that are looking for crumbs around the foreign embassies.  So this, in fact, the infrastructure, the value infrastructure, the ideological infrastructure pretty much had been in place.  But this war had shown that it is deployed now and which brings me to the last point.

Having done this and having, probably, not to pay any price for it, so it seems, the conclusions that Moscow will draw is that -- and again, we suspected that all along.  But now this was has proven it, is that perhaps it’s time to become a revisionist authoritarian state, meaning that you may rail at the score but for the most part, don’t try to change the rules of the game or your partners in that game.  I think Russia has crossed this border.  It is now changing the rules of the game, it is changing the partners, it is changing the geography of its engagement with the near abroad and here I concur with the speakers, the goal here is either a complete change of the regime or incapacitating Georgia to such an extent that, in effect, it becomes a state incapable of conducting an independent, particularly pro-Western foreign policy.

I also, like Fred, found very interesting this charge of genocide, which incidentally was leveled in the first, literally, the first hours of war.  And I think, at the very least, it’s a ploy for prolonging the presence of the Russian troops because Russia would undoubtedly demand the surrender of the leaders that are accused of genocide to the international tribunal or better yet, to the Russian court, impartial and independent.  The Georgians, of course, will refuse.  That will become a sticking point and at the very least, it will essentially ensure the presence of the Russian troops on the Georgian soil for a considerable time to come.

And finally, what next?  Well, that becomes very obvious.  If Russia pays little or no price, and that seems increasingly so, the next target of opportunity is Ukraine.  Now, of course, not the entire country but the peninsula of Crimea; primarily a Russian-language and Russian populated area, the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and especially its home base, the city of Sevastopol.  Again, ceded by Boris Yeltsin in one of those brilliant moves, brilliant sacrifices that he made in order to keep peace in the post-Soviet state in 1997, but of course, with everything else, it’s reversed now.  And there has been a very steady drumbeat in the Russian official media and in the Duma, of late, that not only the base of Sevastopol must not be vacated after the lease is over in 2011, but in fact, the entire Crimea ought to be re-taken and become part of Russia. 

So that is why not only President Yushchenko had spoken on the phone almost hourly with Saakashvili, he in fact flew to Tbilisi along with the other potential victims which is the Baltic republics and Poland to show their support.  And I think, if that line of reasoning holds, if, in fact, this war showed the emergence of Russia as a restless authoritarian state, then I think we have a great deal of work to do for the next President of the United States regardless who that would be.

Thomas Donnelly:  Thank you, Leon.  That concludes what I would regard as a sobering, if not actually, sort of, frightening set of presentation which I wanted to thank everybody for -- even when moved by emotion as much as intellect, stuck very closely to the facts of the case and that’s really what we would like to do in the Q&A session as well.  So I want to reiterate the three rules of AEI Q&A: wait for the microphone, state your name and affiliation for purposes of the transcript.  And I want to emphasize the third one in particular, please try to put your statement in the form of a question and particularly err on the side of asking your question rather than making a statement.

I will try to work my way around the room.  I think, despite the length of the presentations, we’ll take some time to work through this and I’ll just begin right here.

Andrew Schneider:  Andrew Schneider from the Kiplinger Letter and this is specifically for Dr. Aron but throw it open to anyone else, as well.  What do you think is the likelihood in the aftermath, given the risk to Ukraine that Europe will re-think its opposition to offering a membership plan in NATO to Ukraine and regardless of that, what’s the likelihood that we might see some greater response if and when the Russians do decide to move on Ukraine?

Leon Aron:  This is the key question.  It could be that the Russians, as they’ve done repeatedly in their history, brought out to reality their worst fears by trying to deflect them.  My colleagues may have a better insight on this.  This is the question of questions -- is the NATO leadership and the EU for that matter which is very close, will they draw the conclusion from this that we should stay away from this former, former Soviet states in order not to be sucked into an armed conflict?  And I think that clearly was one of the Putin subplots in this.  Or, they would decide that, in order to prevent these types of things from happening, we ought to offer the membership’s protection to those nations.  I’m not optimistic.  I’m tending towards the former conclusion.

Thomas Donnelly:  I would just briefly, just have me in the midst of looking at the effect of Afghanistan on NATO militaries.  And setting aside the question as to whether the Western Europeans had the willpower which I would be somewhat skeptical about or excessively skeptical about, they simply like the capacity to respond to the degree that in addition to offering a path to NATO membership, it would be necessary to do material things by way of immediately improving Ukrainian military capacity or positioning forces nearby.  None of the Western European militaries has a significant capacity to conduct such an operation at this moment. 

It’ also it is worth noting that those NATO members, the Poles and the Ukrainians have been -– I’m not sure if they’ve been in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, I don’t recall -- at any rate, one can expect Eastern European members to take the lesson that deploying abroad to help the United States, at a time when in the homeland is immediately at risk, has great strategic risks attached to it.  So, does anybody else have something to add?

Ralph Peters:  I think the prevailing attitude in Europe is, why die for Danzig.  This is -- I hope to be pleasantly surprised but I think this is going to harden Germany, Italy, and others against Ukraine, against Georgia, and because you’ve got to remember, the Western European states, “Old Europe” -- not a bad term, maybe the only good thing Rumsfeld ever did was coin that -- “Old Europe” is already annoyed at Eastern Europe, at the new NATO members and from Central Europe and Eastern Europe.  They are too pro-American, they’re too raucous, they have their own minds and they’re not supposed to do that. 

And then you remember that much of Western Europe is still virtually a vassal to Russian gas exports.  You have a former Bundist chancellor of Germany, the odious Gerhard Schröder went to work for a Russian energy cartel after he left office.  I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised but my God, the Europeans are already caving.  There is much that can be done: kick them out of the G8, take them on the WTO, cancel the Sochi Olympics, various kinds of defense pacts and agreements with Ukraine and Georgia.  Look at the -– scrutinize Russian banks, their international transactions, scrutinize corporations, there is a lot that could be done.  And I don’t think Europe’s going to do any of it.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I think, Ralph, you’re absolutely right.  I also think we’re probably not going to do any of it either, unfortunately.

Ralph Peters:  We’ll say a few things.

Frederick W. Kagan:  We’ll say a few things, right, but well, in between quarters in the basketball game.

Thomas Donnelly:  If Lebron says so.

Frederick W. Kagan:  If Lebron says so, but let me just throw a few additional facts on the table so that we can understand that these are not hypothetical stakes, these are current issues.  The Estonian Parliament met in emergency session over the weekend and voted overwhelmingly not only to support the territorial integrity of Georgia but specifically to request that NATO consider expedited membership for Georgia in NATO.  And that was in addition to a very, very strongly worded statement signed by the presidents of the Baltic States and Poland. 

The Ukrainians announced, rather ostentatiously, early on in this, that they were reserving the right to prevent the Black Sea Fleet from returning to Sevastopol if the Black Sea Fleet was participating in the conflict.  The Russians dodged by re-deploying that flotilla to Novorossiysk, which is in Russian territory for the moment, presumably now that the conflict is over, the Ukrainians will allow the Black Sea Fleet to return to Sevastopol. 

But the Russians got that message loud and clear and returned fire, loud and clear making the case that Russian aircraft that had been shot down had been shot down because the Ukrainians have been providing technical assistance to the Georgians.  And so they have painted a Ukrainian-American alliance to protect Georgian genocide against Russian citizens, that’s the meme that has been playing in the Russian media in a big way.  And you have seen, I think, a dramatic increase in tensions between Russia and Ukraine over this past weekend.  So that’s not a hypothetical either. 

You’ve also seen the Azerbaijanis commit to Georgia on this and if you look carefully, you can see two perpendicular regional axes at odds here.  There is an axis that runs Azerbaijan-Georgia-Ukraine, to a lesser extent, Turkey-United States.  And then there is an axis that runs Russia-Armenia-Iran-Kazakhstan, most of the other Central Asian states and so forth. 

This has been an enormous victory, not only for Russia, also for Iran, which is very, very happy to see the American client state in the Caucasus destroyed; also because it weakens Azerbaijan, which has been the target of Iranian efforts to neuter.  So the point is, there is already a tendency in the Western press and the American media, as Ralph already says, who wants to die for Danzig or in this case Gori, but the fact -- and you know, Georgia is a far-off place of which we know little and so on –-

Male Voice:  Whose language we don’t speak.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Right, whose language we don’t speak and write, exactly.  We can’t even read their alphabet.  But the truth of the matter is, this isn’t –- as with many of these things, this is not an irrelevant, trivial local conflict that’s too hard to understand in the midst of a presidential race where the question of suitability for commander-in-chief has been raised as an issue.  I have to say that the complexities of dealing with the long-term ramifications of this problem are quite significant.

Thomas Donnelly:  Fred, I’d like you to make sure that people where I cannot see -- so.

Male Voice:  [indiscernible].

Thomas Donnelly:  Okay.  Now, I’m again going to circle.  I’m going to start with the gentleman at the second table and point out we’ve got about 20 minutes or maybe a little bit more depending on --

Male Voice:  Well, this is very sobering indeed and I think we all are disturbed somewhat by this, by the failure of our policy to anticipate this.  I was particularly taken by the comments that were made.  And I know that you’re not responsible for policies, Colonel.  And there may be little that you can comment on here, however, our training up under the GTEP program or expeditionary forces from Georgia, an ally that was encouraged and rah-rahed by us and trained in counter-terror to serve our mission in a foreign country far distant from their interests and the failure of policy to train them and then either anticipating or doing what must be done with an ally, the United States, as an encouraging, rah-rahing ally, to support their own at home I think is something -- there will be eagles coming home to roost on this one. 

And I think that it is high time, in fact, past time that we learn the lesson here, it may indeed be too late without allies and without a national will to do anything about the states that are being occupied.  But we can anticipate and take action to protect the Ukraine and our other allies and to hold the word of the United States, not just in our own interests, but allies that we gather for interest [indiscernible].  I’m interested in the comments of each of the panelists on how this is going to affect our position in the global war on terror and the consequences flowing from this failure of U.S. policy, in encouraging allies to support us in the larger global war on terror and the common interest that we might have had with Russia had we engaged policy differently to join together with them in fighting that war?  Thank you.

Thomas Donnelly:  I recognize that that’s an important question.  It is slightly at the margins of our agenda today so I’ll ask people to be somewhat brief and anybody who would want to respond to that.

Ralph Peters:  What Russia did is a terrorist attack.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Just very briefly, I think we’ve always tended to overstate our common interest with Russia in the global war on terror.  Russians hate Chechens.  They do not have, I think, a particular principle position about Muslims except they don’t like them.  Russia’s an incredibly xenophobic society and they don’t like terrorists who operate on their soil.  But the Chechens are a particular issue, largely because they are a criminal gang in Moscow.  And so particularly hated and then they tried to break away. 

The notion that Russia was ever going to be a reliable partner with us in this regard, I think, has always been delusional and it gets briefly –- I promise to be brief, Tom –- but it does get briefly to a larger problem which is that it is time for the United States of America to stop trying to subcontract elements of its foreign policy to states that are dubiously aligned with our interests. 

And I think we’ve done that in China, and I think that we’ve done it in Russia, and the excuse -- and you’re now hearing this from the conceived wisdom of the liberal elite in this town -- is that this shows that we’re dependent on Russia and we need to work with Russia in order so that they could help us with Iran.  What the Russians are doing with Iran, apart from powering their nuclear reactors, is preparing to deploy advanced surface-to-air defense systems in Iran next year, which are one of factors that are driving the Israelites to think about striking this year.  That’s what the Russians, our good allies are engaged in.  So I think this is an opportunity for us to have a wake-up call about the fact that subcontracting our strategy in the Caucasus and the Middle East to the Russians on the principle that they’re going to line up with us somehow against Muslim terrorism is a mistake.

Thomas Donnelly:  Thank you.  I’m going to ask the young lady standing up.

Maria Pena:  Yes, thank you.  Maria Pena with EFE News Services.  I was wondering if you can address the fact that the U.S. does need to work with Russia on certain international fronts, like somebody just said, Iran and also North Korea, but the broader question is, what to do now after the ceasefire agreement is signed by both parties?  What do you see as the U.S.-Russian relations moving forward from now on?  And also, if you agree with critics that say that this was not targeting Georgia, but more, it was targeting NATO’s expansion and the West in general?

Thomas Donnelly:  The process will be we’ll come down the row.

Ralph Peters:  Let me do a quickie here.  Look, one thing Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush have in common is they both personalize foreign policy.  The difference is Bush thinks everybody is his friend and Putin assesses everybody as his enemy.  And politics are not only local, they’re personal.  In addition to trying to deter anyone from expanding NATO, Putin clearly, viscerally hates Mikheil Saakashvili.  Because Saakashvili, for all of his failings, has been willing to thumb his nose at Putin and no one in the empire of the czar thumbs his nose at the czar.

Frederick W. Kagan:  And I think the empire of the czar has a very apt point.  Was this aimed at NATO?  Sure, it was aimed at NATO.  Why?  It was aimed at NATO because this is part, as Leon quite rightly and accurately has been pointing out for some time, Czar Vladimir -- which would he be?  The first?

Ralph Peters:  He’s got to be the first.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Okay, as czar.  Czar Vladimir the First has the objective of re-creating the Soviet Empire in everything that the Russians now call the “near abroad” and what they would like to call the re-conquered territories.  I think that’s very clear.  And NATO is an obstacle to that.  And apart from traditional Russian dislike of NATO, NATO is getting in the way of what the actual objective is.  So not only -- I have a problem with saying this wasn’t an attack on Georgia because it was Georgians who were dying and it’s the Georgian state that’s under threat and it’s the Georgian president whom the Russians are trying to remove, so it certainly was, whatever else, an attack on Georgia.  But to say that it’s an attack on NATO, is to put the onus on NATO. 

It is an attack on the principle of the sovereignty of any of the states of the former Soviet Union with regard to Moscow and the explicit assertion that Russian citizens in those states are liable to the protections and punishments of Russian law even when they’re within the sovereign territories of those states, which has been repeated over and over again by the Russian leadership in this, including the Russian legal leadership in this, and the notion that the Russians can use their military force to protect the dignity of Russian citizens in those states, which Medvedev has repeated. 

Can you imagine what would happen if President Bush, or President Obama for that matter, got up and said that the United States of America has the right to use American military force around the world, whatever it likes, in order to protect the dignity of American citizens abroad?  How would that play?  But this is exactly what we’re talking about here.  So, I really think it’s important not to be side-tracked on the issues of Russian propaganda lines.

Ralph Peters:  You’ve got to understand.  In Russia, dignity is a rare and precious commodity.

Thomas Donnelly:  Look, I have one further comment to make and I think it’s worth turning your question on its head.  If these international processes, the process of trying to halt the Iranian nuclear program or reverse the North Korean nuclear program are so dependent upon Russia or perhaps others whose interests are inimical to ours, what kind of a process is that and how likely is it to lead to a conclusion that advances American interests?  I want to get the young gentleman at that table.

I just want to apologize, we’re not likely to get to all the questions but we’re going to go for geographic distribution and then we’ll come back to the front again if time permits.

Miles Smit:  Miles Smit from SBR Global Consulting in Toronto.  I wonder if any of the panelists had, in terms of pressure points on the Russians, any willingness to comment and what would be the minimum measures necessary to blunt or reverse the Russian gains so far?

Thomas Donnelly:  Ralph, why don’t you –- Ralph laid out a number of steps that could be taken.  I invite any other panelists both, to either add to that list or comment to whether they’re likely to be effective in that narrow objective of reversing what’s happened in the last week.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Much as I hate to take issue with anything that the New York Times, the paper of record, reports, I don’t think that this is over.  And we have right now, a very fundamental problem and the question is, how are we going to save Mikheil Saakashvili?  Because it is very clear to me, and I think to Leon and Ralph and the other panelists as well, that the Russians have him in their sights.  And the Russians are going to try very, very hard to engineer his removal from power.  And we need to make it very clear that that is unacceptable.  Now, how do you do that? 

One of the things I think that we need to do is, we either have a variety of things we need to insist upon including that the Russian aircraft stop violating Georgian airspace routinely, which they’re doing in the name reconnaissance flights and a variety of other things, that Russians withdraw their forces.  We should insist on international peacekeepers.  That integrated air defense system that we were talking about for Georgia?  Really good idea.  I’d like to see that going in right now.

Ralph Peters:  Fred, thanks for bringing that up because this is something that I forgot to mention earlier and it really is a kind of thing folks are missing.  The Russians now admit that the Georgians have knocked down six of their planes; that was as of yesterday.  The Georgians claim over a dozen and it’s probably closer to that, but that may not sound like much, that the Russians lost six to twelve fighters. 

But as the Colonel told you, Georgia doesn’t even have a real air defense system.  It tells you something about the continuing weaknesses of their forces.  That this tiny state with virtually no air defenses can knock Russian fighters out of the sky, which is why I said, Putin must be furious and actually embarrassed right now.  And to put it in perspective, we’ve flown tens of thousands of sorties since Desert Storm.  Statistically, we have lost zero aircraft - we did lose two over the years in combat operations.  Statistically, that is a zero.  So the old Russian traditions of maskirovka and pakazooka is just trying to fool the world.  The facts are there if you want to see them.  If you don’t want to see them, they’re not. 

For instance, no one questioned, no one in the media questioned the fact that the very morning after the fighting starts, Friday morning, the Russians are holding media events in Vladikavkaz with photogenic South Ossetian refugees.  For days, before the fighting started, the Russians had been bussing South Ossetians across the border into North Ossetia.  Who questions that?  I mean, the facts are there.  But if you’re unwilling to see what Russia is doing, if journalists are so lazy, they just accept Moscow’s briefings or Moscow’s talking points, then there’s not much hope because ultimately -- I’m always glad to criticize the media when they deserve it -but if the Western media and ultimately, the global media doesn’t call Putin out, they win.

Frederick W. Kagan:  There’s a question all the way behind the screen by the way.

Thomas Donnelly:  Yes, in fact, I was going there.  Ma’am?

Female Voice:  Great, you get to criticize media.  Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.  It has been hard.  We’ve been trying to get information about Tskhinvali and reporters haven’t been getting in there to see what these charges of genocide are all about.  If the Georgians held Tskhinvali for 24-36 hours, they must have been very effective with their bombing, their artillery, their snipers, everybody to cause 2,000 casualties.  So can you dissect that for us a little bit, from what you know?

Ralph Peters:  You ask the Russians a very simple question:  Where are the bodies?

Thomas Donnelly:  Look, I would just say, by framing the story as a question of genocide, the Russians have already determined what the agenda is.  Part of the question is, what stories are the media chasing?  And thus far, they seem to be chasing all the leads, all the narratives that issue forth from Moscow.  So the first question, is for editor-types to say, what is my independent assessment of what the story is and again, what particularly should we be following up on?

Frederick W. Kagan:  This is going to get worse before it gets better on this genocide issue because the Russians occupy the ground and the Russians have bussed 30,000-some refugees, which is like half the population of South Ossetia.  The genocide charge is amusing.  That number - the South Ossetian de facto government in Tskhinvali - announced that 1,400 people had been killed within about 15 minutes of the outbreak of the operation and that number was immediately repeated and then increased. 

But what you’re going to see now because Medvedev ordered a series of investigative commissions and a leader of that commission flew down to Vladikavkaz with 150 forensic experts and they were photographing all of the corpses, no doubt from multiple angles and multiple clothes.  And they are interviewing everybody that they might conceivably call a South Ossetian refugee and if they in fact move forward with this as I think they will, you will find the media market flooded with images and eye-witness testimony out of Tskhinvali that the Georgians will not be able to dispute because they’re not there.

Ralph Peters:  Really, the Russians realize the value of the big lie.  This is you know, Stalin, Goebbels, the whole thing, you immediately accuse the other guy.  You accuse Poland with aggression as you are invading.  And this has happened again, and again, and again.  And we have a problem that the media likes to think it has to be fair and impartial and stuff and that leads it to, many in the media, to give credibility to these outrageous, outlandish big lies.  Russia has been on the media offensive again, brilliantly; my hat’s off to them.  They are outclassing us from start to finish.

Leon Aron:  If I could just add something.  Fred and I have spoken over the last few days.  Not that -- I mean, apart from everything that was said here -- not that Saakashvili is blameless in this, in a sense that there was a huge overkill in the attack on Tskhinvali.  And I don’t know if it was part of the technical ineptitude or it was sort of an idea of getting brute force out there and so on.  There was an artillery attack on Tskhinvali.  I don’t know if, as the Russians claimed, the Georgians deployed the Grad system, which essentially is a modernized Katyusha, which could do a great deal of damage.  So I think the bodies are probably there.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I agree with that, and I think, look, the problem that we’re going to have -- I’m sure that you would be able to document evidence of civilian casualties.  Genocide is, I think, an absurd accusation in the context but war atrocities and war crimes, I’m sure -- I would be surprised if they weren’t.  It was a very badly planned and conducted operation that the Georgians engaged in and it was somewhat ill-disciplined.  So that I think is probably there.  The problem is Tskhinvali has been destroyed by all accounts. 

The Russians say the Georgians did it, which really would be as the questioner pointed out, pretty good work for an army like that in a short period of time.  Of course, the Russians then fought their way through it with armoured forces.  And the Russians are not known for their light touch in mechanized urban warfare.  So, actually demonstrating who did what in Tskhinvali, in the context, is something that I think would be very difficult to sort out but Leon’s point is valid.

Ralph Peters:  Yes, Fred’s got a very important point.  These are masonry cities.  They’re ugly but they’re pretty solidly built.  It’s very, very hard to destroy a city unless you’re dropping big bombs from the air or have massive amounts of artillery.  The Georgians never had the capacity to drop big bombs from the air and they don’t have massive amounts of artillery.  And you know, if you get people in there on the ground -- this may be too-down-the-weeds but, there are simple ways to do ballistic analysis.  It’s not hard to tell which direction an artillery shell came from.  But I don’t think the Russians are going to let anybody in there in the near future to do that.

Thomas Donnelly:  Bob, I want to give the opportunity since you --

Bob Hamilton:  Just real quickly.  I think that the genocide charge is part of an interesting sub-current to this entire conflict in that is the Russian attempt to take the Kosovo precedent to its logical conclusion.  The Russians were very explicit late last year when it looked like Kosovo might declare independence.  They told us, they told Saakashvili, we will link Kosovo to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  There are a thousand reasons why the precedent is invalid, why there are different types of conflicts. 

But this is I think part of a very cynical attempt on the part of the Russians.  They’ve got to be revelling in the irony of their saying and doing things that mirror what NATO did in Kosovo.  They accused the Georgians of genocide, they bombed strategic infrastructure which is how NATO brought Serbia to its knees.  The Russians are bombing the port in Poti, they’re trying to hit the pipeline, so they’re bombing civilian infrastructure.  They are calling Saakashvili a war criminal and I would not be surprised at some point in the future to see some sort of Russian attempt -- we know there’s a Russian attempt to bring him down.  They’ve stated that publicly, but to get ahold of him and get him out of there and put him on trial, that would bring Kosovo, the Kosovo precedent to its logical endgame and I think that’s part of what they’re doing.

Thomas Donnelly:  I’m sorry.  We’re really coming to the end.  Obviously, we’ve raised a lot more issues and we’ve just begun to really work through the set of issues here.  I promised the young woman in the middle a chance, and that’ll be the final question.

Ella Asoyan: Ella Asoyan in Freedom House.  A lot of parallels have been drawn with the Georgia and the invasion of Russia and occupying South Ossetia including Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, et cetera.  However, I think, a more accurate analogy also would be what Russia has done in Chechnya in 1994, is what Saakashvili did in South Ossetia, and therefore holding Russia as the only criminal in this, I think, is just taking the responsibility of the situation and giving it unbiased and objective assessment.  And I would like to ask, how the United States would equate those two and perhaps the failure of the United States to account and hold accountable Saakashvili and what he did in Tskhinvali on the first day perhaps is the consistency of the United States to overlook certain details like they did in Chechnya in 1994.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I have a real problem with the moral relativism that equates what the Russians did in Chechnya with what Saakashvili did in Tskhinvali to the extent that we know what Saakashvili did in Tskhinvali.  To begin with, the scale is rather different.  In addition to that, the follow-on has been rather different in we can talk about what Saakashvili would have done and what the ultimate objective was, of course, he wasn’t given the chance.  But we also need to talk about what the Russians did in Tskhinvali and elsewhere, and what the Russians have done throughout Georgia. 

The situation is very complicated.  Saakashvili was responding to a series of provocations that the Russians and their clients in South Ossetia were deliberately staging, this is very clear, it’s very well documented.  It was a violation de facto of the ceasefire agreement and the 1992 peacekeeping agreement by which they were all there, that the Georgians were taking fire from South Ossetia and the Russian peacekeepers were not stopping it. 

Now, Saakashvili has said at some point, that the Russian peacekeeping commander told him that they had lost control of the situation and therefore, de facto the Georgians were going to have to intervene.  That may have been a variant of the old Star Trek Kobayashi Maru ploy of just luring the Georgians in brilliantly, to do this -- I don’t know if it happened at all, but this is a complicated situation.  I’m sorry.  I think that the parallel to the Kosovo campaign and the determination to bring Milosevic down is a much stronger parallel at this point, and therefore, it’s much more worrisome in my view.

Ralph Peters:  There are so many factors that just aren’t discussed in the media.  You want to talk about human rights violations, how about the hundreds of thousands of Georgian, ethnic Georgian refugees driven out of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by the Russians?  Now, I said, look, I was there in the early 90’s when this was starting.  The North Ossetia-Abkhazia separatists were a handful of nuts and gangsters.  The Russians essentially created this movement.  As the Soviet Union was coming apart, the Russians -- I saw the same thing in Karabakh when the Russians jumped sides when it was to their convenience.  The Russian security services, as the Soviet Union was coming apart, created these movements to keep the -- what was then called the “near abroad,” unsettled. 

And Russia has never cared about human rights, come on.  The butchery in Chechnya, the first time and the second time, the atrocious, monstrous behavior of the Russians and then to say, as Fred said and as we laid out, the Russians provoked the Georgians.  Saakashvili had no choice but to go in last Thursday and he was cornered into it and the troops were sloppy, out of control, they didn’t do well.  And nobody’s making excuses for any Georgian soldiers who behaved badly or commanders who lost control of their units, but it is a matter of scale.  And Kosovo, Kosovo, that movement wasn’t started by the CIA, it was an indigenous organic movement in response to Serb pressure and bullying. 

The Georgians weren’t terrorizing and butchering and kidnapping Abkhazians or South Ossetians back in the early 1990s and I go back to what I said in the beginning.  Okay, fair is fair.  You want to give the Abkhazians and the South Ossetians a chance to re-plebiscite their independence?  Go to it.  But you’ve got to hold one in Chechnya and Dagastan, and across the North Caucasus and elsewhere.  Who is calling –- nobody is raising that issue.  Russia -– I mean, my God, where are your brains, media folks?  You’re not asking any questions, you’re just parroting Moscow’s party line.  It’s like the New York Times in the 1930s.  There is no famine in Ukraine, all the peasants are happy here.

Thomas Donnelly:  I would invite Bob and the others to make any final comments they may have on this subject.  None?

Okay, well that serves as a fitting conclusion; I think we should all give a round of applause to the panelists for super presentation.  Here endeth the lesson and I think we’ll do something on this line again, pretty soon.  Thank you.

[End of Transcript]