The Georgia Crisis: A Blow to NATO
Washington hawks insist that the remedy to Russia's military humiliation of Georgia is to expedite the smaller country's incorporation into NATO. After all, Moscow might think twice about attacking any nation able to trigger the Atlantic Alliance's Article 5, which obliges all member states to respond militarily to an attack on any one of them. President Bush, in fact, toured Europe last spring to stump aggressively for Georgia and Ukraine to be granted Membership Action Plans, the first step towards joining the Alliance. But despite Bush's high-profile campaigning, the proposal was rebuffed at NATO's April summit by 10 member states, led by key U.S. allies Germany and France. That rebuff, said Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain, "might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia," and he urged European NATO members to "revisit the decision."
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But many of the Europeans draw the opposite conclusion. They see last week's events in Georgia as vindicating their caution over granting Georgia NATO membership. Indeed, many in Europe see the Bush Administration's military support for Georgia and its trumpeting of Tblisi's cause in NATO as having emboldened President Mikheil Saakashvili to launch his reckless attack on South Ossetia.
If Russia's brutal response to Georgia's provocation had, in fact, obliged NATO to intervene, the Atlantic Alliance itself might have faced a terminal crisis. Most of its member states have no enthusiasm for confronting a resurgent Russia in the Caucasus, traditionally a Russian sphere of influence. The Alliance, for one thing, is having enough trouble maintaining 71,000 troops in Afghanistan, where they are only managing to tread water against mounting odds. Other arguments against confrontation: much of Western Europe is wholly dependent on Russian energy supplies, and European negotiators believe there is little chance of a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear standoff without committed support from Moscow.
So, regardless of the appeals of Senator McCain  and his Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama  the events of the past week have more likely placed Georgia's NATO membership in the deep freeze for the foreseeable future, even if the Alliance remains rhetorically committed to the idea in principle. If so, Moscow can count what has transpired as a major victory: it has prevented the advance of a rival military alliance into Russia's backyard.
Russia's very purpose in its "punishment" of Georgia has been to warn neighbors inclined to challenge Moscow from under a Western security umbrella that if a storm is provoked, that umbrella offers precious little protection. The conflict was never simply about Georgia and its restive minority regions; it was always about NATO, and the regional balance of power between Russia and the U.S.
Putin has used the opportunity presented by Saakashvili to show Russia's neighbors that Washington's tough talk could not be matched by any meaningful response to the Kremlin's military campaign. Bush may now be trying to play catch-up with his tough talk, but reversing the impact of the Russian offensive will require a lot more than stitching up a bloodied Georgia and casting Russia out of the G-8 or boycotting the Winter Olympics. (Thursday's announcement of a deal between the U.S. and Poland to station missile interceptors on Russia's doorstep over increasingly bellicose objections from Moscow may have been timed to signal resolve in the face of Russian aggression, but that plan was in the works long before the Georgia showdown, and is unlikely to have any effect on the Georgia situation.)
When NATO holds its last summit of the Bush presidency in December, the symbolic language may remain soothingly supportive of membership for Georgia, but don't expect to see it granted a Membership Action Plan. Indeed, the events of the past week have called into question the very purpose of NATO and its relationship with Russia.
While many Western critics declared the Russian action of the past week a reversion to Cold War tactics, Moscow sees NATO itself as a Cold War relic. The Russians complain that following the demise of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Treaty Organization, the U.S. reneged on promises to create a new global security order and instead moved to expand its own Cold War military alliance  NATO  into Moscow's own sphere of influence.
NATO's very purpose had been to contain the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II. The Red Army had just broken the back of Hitler's Wehrmacht and put Moscow in control of the Baltic states (annexed at the outset of the war), Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Having watched Central Europe transformed by Soviet military power into a patchwork of authoritarian vassal states, Western Europe was only too willing to join an all-for-one military alliance with the U.S. and Canada to even up the odds in the event of further Soviet expansionism. Nor was it surprising that, decades later, those Europeans who had actually lived under the Soviet heel would race to join the same alliance at the first opportunity. The anti-Moscow military alliance not only remained intact in the decade after the Cold War, but advanced towards Russia's shrinking borders. Russians saw all of that as strategic encirclement with hostile intent.
Last month, General Norton Schwartz, nominated as chief of the U.S. Air Force, told his confirmation hearing that the U.S. needed to send a warning to Moscow in the wake of Russian media reports claiming that Moscow was weighing the deployment of nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba, in response to U.S. missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russians should be told that moving bombers to Cuba "crosses a red line for the United States of America," he said. Let's just say that the Russian military brass have long felt the same way about Ukraine and Georgia being militarily integrated into a rival alliance.
Russia could do little to stem NATO's advance during the economic and social collapse presided over by Boris Yeltsin. But Putin's Russia, flush with petrodollars, has reemerged as a geopolitical player at the same time as U.S. influence has been waning. With the bloodletting in Georgia, the Russians are telling Europe that the current security architecture is dysfunctional  a message Moscow sent earlier in the year through a vague proposal to replace NATO with a pan-European security structure in which Russia was an equal partner.
In Washington and in many former Soviet satellite states, the response to the Georgia debacle will be to continue NATO's eastward expansion and stiffen its resolve to contain a resurgent Russia. But in Western Europe, there will be growing doubts over the value of a security system built upon a structure designed to isolate and contain Russia. The problem, of course, is that NATO operates strictly by consensus, and in the absence of such consensus, paralysis may set in. Indeed, it may yet emerge that Putin's campaign in the Caucasus has succeeded not only in keeping Georgia out of NATO, but in dealing a body blow to the Alliance itself.
De acordo com os funcionários georgianos e dispersas imprensas, soldados russos e paramilitares da Ossétia do Sul marcharam a cidade georgiana de Gori. Isto vem um dia depois de uma trégua foi feita pelas duas nações para pôr fim à guerra dos seis dias que tem muitos mortos e milhares desalojados.

Gori, sendo vista pela Fortaleza de Gori.
"A Rússia deslealmente, tem quebrado a própria palavra", declarou o chefe do Conselho de Segurança da Geórgia Alexandre Lomaia. Funcionários georgianos também dizem que Gori foi saqueada e bombardeada pelos russos, embora este último contesta esta alegação.

Um reporter da Associated Press (AP) assistiu dezenas de tanques e veículos militares deixando Gori, em uma direção sudeste. Um soldado russo brincando disse a um fotógrafo, "Vinde a nós, beleza, vamos para Tbilisi!". Tbilisi é a capital da Geórgia.

A caravana da CNN observou milhares de tropas georgianas indo para cima e deixando Gori em alta velocidade. Geórgia disse que era recordando as tropas para defender Tbilisi. De acordo com a AP, uma repóter da BBC assistiu tanques russos nas ruas de Gori, enquanto sul-ossetas foram apreendendo carros georgianos e pilhando casas.

O Presidente georgiano Mikhail Saakashvili afirmou que ele pensa que a resposta do ocidente a esta situação tem sido insuficiente. "Eu sinto que eles são, em parte, a culpa", disse ele. "Não só aqueles que cometem atrocidades ... mas são responsáveis por isso são aqueles que não conseguem reagir."

Um funcionário do Ministério da Defesa russo disse a Interfax, em que as tropas russas foram ao Senaki para "prevenir ataques por unidades militares contra o georgiano da Ossétia do Sul".

"Para começar a reparar os danos causados às suas relações com o Estados Unidos, Europa e de outras nações e para começar a recuperar o seu lugar no mundo, a Rússia deve manter a sua palavra e de agir para pôr termo a esta crise", disse o presidente dos Estados Unidos George W. Bush.

O ministro de Relações Exteriores da Rússia, Sergei Lavrov, os Estados Unidos responderam a declaração apelando a Geórgia "um projeto especial dos Estados Unidos. E nós entendemos que os Estados Unidos estão preocupados com o seu projeto".

Na ONU, o embaixador russo Vitaly Churkin disse que a Rússia não iria resolver assinar um acordo de cessar-fogo, proposta pela França. "Vamos olhar para o projeto e tentar trazê-la a um nível em que pode desempenhar a neste papel", disse Churkin.




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