Lincoln Mitchell on the Georgia-Russia Conflict
Despite the recent cease-fire brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, reports of fighting in Georgia continue, with stories o
f continued Russian presence in cities such as Zugdidi, Poti, and Gori. Though the major news outlets have begun to drift towards other stories, the conflict in Georgia continues. This morning I sat down with Lincoln Mitchell, the Arnold A. Saltzman Assistant Professor in International Politics at Columbia University to discuss some of the background on the conflict and where things might be headed. Professor Mitchell focuses on democratic transitions in the former Soviet Union. He recently returned from Abkhazia on a Harriman Institute sponsored research trip on Frozen Conflicts. He served as chief of party for the National Democratic Institute in Georgia from 2002-2004.
Me: To start, some of my questions are about general motivation and what’s going on from both sides, and looking at what Georgia’s motivation would be.
On my way back from Georgia, I just wanted news about what was going on so I bought a book that was published in 2005. There was one article by Jaba Devdariani mentioning two different times that Georgia went on the offense–with Ajara and the blocking of Russian military bases–and how that the “episode shows that if Georgia seizes the initiative, Russia will not challenge it.” Do you think there’s any truth to that as being potential motivation?
LM: I think that that’s not really a useful approach and we learned that. I don’t want to be in the position of saying somebody’s at fault, Georgia’s at fault– because Georgia’s not at fault here –but I think it is important to make policy in the context of reality, whether you’re the United States or Georgia. The reality is that the Russian military was always able to takeover Georgia if it wanted to. Now, in the past I would argue that it hasn’t had to. I think with the new Georgia, the post-Rose Revolution Georgia … there was a real possibility to Russia that Georgia would get on its feet as a meaningful sovereign state and therefore they had to do something as dramatic as this. Because I do believe that for a variety of reasons, and you can go at that from a lot of ways, Russia didn’t feel it could live with that.
Me: So then the whole question of why now? People have been pointing to the Olympics, they’ve been pointing to U.S. elections. Does the imminent closure of Russian bases have an impact?
LM: I don’t think the Olympics are a huge factor here. If anything it was a big miscalculation because Bush does have to be in an international setting, and frankly Bush is the kind of guy who– especially as he’s in his last year as president and he like sports–he’s going to be paying attention to the Olympics and it’s been a good Olympics for the United States and he doesn’t really need this.
Unfortunately, I think the presidential election in the United States played a role, but I would say in a very disingenuous way. I think the notion that Barack Obama is not going to be a supporter of Georgia is just flat out wrong and they know that in Tbilisi, and they know that in Washington, and they know that in Moscow. However, I think there was a miscalculation internally in Georgia with the willingness to use the election as a means to build support. I would urge you to look at the statement made by Congress today or yesterday. I thinks it’s a very strong statement and I think it shows that we have bipartisan support for Georgia and a bipartisan awareness of the reality of the situation.
Me: Though I suppose you could see, especially in the initial reactions between McCain and Obama…
LM: To some extent, I think from McCain you have you have a candidate’s bluster and from Obama you have “what would I actually do if I were President?” I think you’ve seen that with other issues globally as well. So that’s one issue.
Misha’s a provocable guy. I think that Russia’s approach has been, if we provoke him enough eventually one of these times he will snap. And I think that was also part of it. And I think another part of it is that there must have been people around Saakashvili who said maybe we can sneak this sunrise past this rooster– a dumb idea to be sure but I think there were people there who were pushing for it. And I think those are the major reasons that led to why now.
I know last Thursday when this started, I was skyping and phoning with Georgians and Americans who are 
Georgia watchers and all of us were saying there’s a 1 in 10, 1 in 50, whatever number you want to give it, chance he’s going to pull it off and wouldn’t that be good. I mean, I do think also there is a couple of things to keep in mind about South Ossetia. One is the accusations on the Russian side against Saakashvili, from everything I’ve seen, are way out of line. I don’t think the notion that this is comparable to Milosovic in Kosovo makes for a kind of convenient parallel, but it’s not grounded in reality and that’s troubling to me. Having said that, I think we should be aware that there are South Ossetian victims of this who are suffering. But, having said that I think there are South Ossetians who in a moment of honesty would tell you they’ve been used by both sides. And the Russians have used South Ossetians as a means of achieving their broader goal of destabilizing Georgia.
So what do you do if you’re Georgian? Well you probably don’t send your troops in because you’re going to get this in response. I don’t know any Georgian who is surprised by this. But, you have to do something. I’ve noticed from the readings on the internet there are some things worth mentioning. One thing is going from Gori to Tskhinvali is not considered crossing an international border. Georgian troops did not cross an international border here. It is broadly recognized as part of Georgia. A part of Georgia that is not consolidated and over which Tbilisi doesn’t exercise sovereignty– but this is not the U.S. and Puerto Rico relationship and it’s certainly not the U.S. and Cuba relationship. Maybe the U.S. and Missouri or Michigan relationship… So there is that side to it. But I would also say that with all the violence that we’ve seen over the last week or so on this issue, no Georgian soldier has fired a gun or dropped a bomb on Russian territory, or any foreign territory. That’s a point that’s worth keeping in mind here.
Me: It could get lost.
LM: I think it has gotten lost.
Me: So then what about from the Russian side? I remember at the GFSIS conference, Pavel Felgenhauer was talking about the build up of railroad troops. Has this been somewhat premeditated on the Russian side?
LM: I think they had a response ready to go and that they were smart enough to wait for an opportunity to get to where they could at least get half support, or at least get some wiggle-room so that the people that don’t really want to challenge them on this don’t have to.
Me: And what about the closure of Russian bases in Georgia that was scheduled for later on this year. Could that have had an impact on any motivation on their part?
LM: It’s all part of the picture. It all feeds into that “wow, Georgia’s leaning to the west, we’re going to lose them” notion. Now, I think the relationship between Russian and Georgia is a deep complicated historical one. A colleague I talked to yesterday made a lot of sense when he said that Russia views Georgia as its nutty little brother who needs to be held in line every now and then. And Georgia views Russia as an enemy. So that relationship is really different. But it is really complicated. I also think that whether or not we agree with how Russians feel, we have to recognize that they do, and they will feel this way. We knew with Kosovo independence that this was going to happen. And we probably should have known when we went into Iraq that this was going to embolden people. Now anybody can say that this is a threat, and this is the precedent, and preemptive war and all this nonsense. So that certainly complicates the issue.
However, there also are some other things going on. Georgia is a sovereign state –albeit one about which the United States has dramatically overstated its democratic progress, albeit one that has turned entirely to the United States for its security, albeit one that is capable of saber-rattling and bellicose rhetoric, but one that has certainly shown no threat to its neighbors, one that has in recent years wrestled to integrate minorities into their population, though not always perfectly, has been invaded by a powerful neighbor. That’s not good. Now when we say that’s not acceptable, I am troubled by that because that implies that Dick Cheney is the determinant of what’s acceptable and what’s not and I don’t think that we should go down that path. But the fact that we may have lost the ability to go down that path shouldn’t mean that Georgia suffers for that.
Me: I’d actually like to go back to the point you were mentioning about imperfect democratization. I’m wondering if there’s any danger to what’s getting lost in the picture of in terms of Russia being portrayed as the big Soviet bully and Georgia is this tiny democratizing…
LM: …plucky little pro-West nation
Me: Exactly. You know, the day I arrived in Georgia, Parliament had convened on a Saturday morning without opposition. They’ve moved the energy regulator to Kutaisi. Is there any danger to this?
LM: I think that the problem is this: there’s a broader issue of U.S. policy towards Georgia since the Rose Revolution on issues related to democracy. I’ve addressed this extensively in my book, I could probably talk about that to the point of boring your readers beyond any reasonable place.
Me: We’ll direct them to the book…
LM: So maybe I won’t go down that path. But, I think that what happened in the last four years was that instead of viewing the Rose Revolution as an important step in the right direction, we viewed it as the consolidation of the Georgian democracy. Suddenly is goes from this semi-democratic kleptocracy to 
Switzerland on the Black Sea, which is, of course, a dramatic overstatement. But the problem with that, as I view it, is that as we talked about Georgian democracy as if it were this great thing, we undermined our credibility. And while the United States was the only important country really talking, by 2007, about Georgian democracy as if it were still great, we were also the only country that really recognized the extent of the Russian threat. The problem is, that if you lead with democracy is perfect, people switch off and say, “this is propaganda.”
Clearly the thing to get into now is, what do we do to stop Russia from pushing as far into Georgia as it wants to? That’s the overwhelming international priority now in terms of what we can do on the ground, what our leadership should be doing, what European leadership, Georgian leadership, Russian leadership, should be doing. That’s the issue we face in the world right now with regards to this conflict. We should be clear on that.
But as we take a step back and say, “how did we get here?” we need to answer these questions because Russia very much wants this to have a kind of demonstrative effect in the region and we need to think about our own demonstrative impact of our work in the region. I would argue that the Georgian state which is now under attack from a neighboring state is weaker than it needed to be because of a lack of democracy over the last four years. And I think that there’s going to be a tendency in Georgia to now say, “we need to be more authoritarian.” No. That’s completely the wrong direction.
Me: And that actually leads into one of my other questions which is, what does Misha do now?
LM: I think that there’s this awkward situation where a guy gets elected president in 2004 in what is I think broadly, undoubtedly a free and fair election, albeit a completely uncompetitive one. But you know I was there in that election, I’ve observed a lot of elections, we’ve all read the reports and I used to say in 2004 that the Georgian President was elected more fairly than the American one, until the reelection of Bush. 2008 is a different story. You have one of these elections where the consensus view of the international community once they’re speaking honestly is “well he probably bumped his vote up to get out of the run-off but he would have won that run-off anyway.” I think that’s actually right. Not great for democracy, obviously, but does that undermine his credibility, his legitimacy as a leader? Well, it undermines his mandate. But I think that, no, he’s still the legitimately elected leader. But then you have a dramatic event that changes everything– this invasion– that’s precipitated by an extraordinarily stupid decision by the President.
So, on the one hand, Russian demands of changing Georgia’s leadership– If I were Georgian, I would say, “you know what, that’s not how Georgia changes its leadership. And that’s not how the world should work.” Now critics would say, “that’s exactly what you did around the world.” Again there’s a false parallelism there. And we shouldn’t have done that. But, well let’s just say, if Georgia’s human rights abuses were even in the same ballpark as Iraq’s, maybe we should have. And maybe when there are widespread human rights abuses neighboring countries can step in and change the leadership. But there are better ways to do that than we’ve done.
But that’s not the case in Georgia anyway. I think that right now what the message the Georgian people should send is that this is about Georgia not Saakashvili and that, “we choose our leaders, thank you very much, Mr. Putin.” And the message the Americans should send is that, “we’re not saying Saakashvili is perfect. We’re saying he’s the leader of Georgia and he should stay the leader of Georgia.” Now, if I were Saakashvili, I might be tempted to rethink whether it makes sense for me to be the leader of Georgia, whether that’s the best thing for Georgia. I would not rethink that now. Now’s not the time. Now he’s president and he’s got to get his country out of this mess.
Me: And do you see any risk in him heading in a more authoritarian direction?
LM: It depends. I think there’s several directions in which Georgia can go. One depends on Russian aggression. Before this, I was on the phone to a Georgian here in the United States who is in tears and taking calls from here family and before that a Georgian in Tbilisi saying, “we know there are tanks coming here, we know there’s still fighting going on.” The woman I was speaking to in Tbilisi is Magrelian and her family is in Zugdidi and says the Russian troops are still there. And that’s not even in the newspapers in the West. And Zugdidi is in Western Georgia, it’s not in Abkhazia.
So the first question is when do they stop? In a month, is Georgia a post-conflict place where it has this very weak national leadership because the international community has to rebuild the physical, s
ocial, economic, and political infrastructure? I really hope not. I hope for the sake of Georgia that that’s not the case. But if it is, then I think we’re back at square one. If the fighting stops tomorrow–and by stops, I mean really stops, not just Medvedev says it stops–then I think this question is really relevant. And it’s going to be a temptation. There’s going to be, I think, three forces in Georgia. One is that bedlam has occurred. Even if it stops today, there’s still social disruption, anarchy. A second is that we, the government are going to go back to the well of authoritarianism and hyper-nationalism to rebuild our support. Which is not a great option. And the third is to hold leadership accountable. How that will play itself out is something we have to watch very closely.
Me: Going back to South Ossetia and Abkhazia– how do you see things going there?
LM: In the best case scenario, realistically, Saakashvili wrote off Abkhazia when he did this because even if a miracle had occurred and he held South Ossetia, Russians were going to redouble their efforts in Abkhazia. And I think they’ve done that. The end game in the frozen conflicts in these two regions has, in my view, always been this: Georgians needed to buy some time. I would have said this a month ago. Georgians needed to buy some time to use that time to essentially make Georgia a more appealing place to be than Russia and then go back with another proposal of a structure that might work. I think the Abkhaz and South Ossetians are smart enough to know exactly what happens to minority groups in Russia. However, they [the Georgians] did the opposite. They sped up the clock. And now, I think that that although the Russian claims of widespread acts of genocide are, I think, overstated in South Ossetia, I think it is fair to say that South Ossetians are not exactly buoyed by the notion of becoming part of Georgia and I think that’s probably, almost certainly true of Abkhazia.
Now, another piece of this that has not come up at all is Samtskhe Javakheti and the real larger minority presences in Georgia are in what we are now calling Georgia proper. The satellite dishes there are pointed to Moscow, as opposed to Tbilisi– not even towards Yerevan. And if I’m the Russians, that’s the front I open up. And that would really be devastating.
Me: Do you think there’s any risk of that?
LM: I always believe there’s a risk of that.
Me: In terms of U.S. Georgia relations now– it seems that the U.S. response was a bit more muted than perhaps the Georgians would have liked and I wonder how that proceeds from here?
LM: It’s a real wake-up call for the Georgians. I think the last year or so has been a real wakeup call for the Georgians. The first time I saw George Bush Highway, I said perhaps to Saakashvili, “what’s President Clinton or Obama going to say about that in 2009?” I don’t think he liked that. I don’t know if I said it to him. I may have. But I certainly said it to everyone else in the Georgian government. But the last time I was there someone had thrown an egg at Bush’s face. Now, that’s just one Georgian. But I think that Georgian opinion towards America is changing anyway. If you look at the American media on this, late last year Georgia stopped being described in the American press as a friend of the United States but as a staunch ally of the Bush White House. That’s not where you want to be, right? To go back to an early analogy, you need to have relations on both sides of the aisle. Now, in fact Georgia does. That’s the irony. They do have support on both sides of the aisle, but they didn’t play it that way. And I think the United States didn’t play it that way either with Georgia. Just being deaf, and offensively deaf to some of the criticisms domestically. So Georgian happiness with the United States was eroding anyway. It wasn’t a crisis or anything like that.
Now I think what they’ve seen is the real wake-up call of just how much America can do for them. I think many believe, rightfully, that the United States would like to help. But I think they’re aware that there’s a whole world out there, that the world is not just Georgia. Or that Georgia is not the center of the world, which is really a counter-intuitive thought for many Georgians, and that a U.S. – Russia policy–and this is the hard part–it encompasses a lot of different issues of which Georgia is only one and not the most important. Now, broader issues of Russian influence in the region, that is more important. But even then we have a very limited number of tools here. So I think whereas Georgia is not going to become anti-American, and the American government is not going to say we want no part of Georgia, there is going to be what could turn into a positive development which is that the Georgian side realizes, you know, we can’t pack up and move to the Caribbean somewhere and become an island. And we have to recognize this and recognize the limits of what the U.S. can do for us. This doesn’t mean pushing Georgia to capitulate to the Russians– but it does mean, to not put too much faith in someone that just can’t help, not that it doesn’t want to.
For the U.S., beyond Georgia, this is a real lesson that we aren’t the hyperpower we think we are. Now, anyone in 2008 who still needs an invasion by Russia to figure that out probably doesn’t have their eye on the ball too much anyway, but I believe there are people who don’t. We are very much seeing the limits of our ability here. And it’s not just that we’re overextended in the Middle East and Afghanistan,but it is that there are countries that are not just militarily strong enough, but that there are also countries with enough economic and political influence that really picking a fight with them would be a mistake. This means that we are very much in a different world now and we are going to have to think about that. I think the thinking about that will happen in the next administration. I don’t see this administration really moving in that direction. But the next administration is going to have to think about that.
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