Is Ossetia Essential?

By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Last year, Brent Scowcroft described to the Council on Foreign Relations his "most difficult judgment call" as George H.W. Bush's national security adviser. It entailed preparing Bush for an early morning news conference regarding an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Later on, Scowcroft was asked about the first Bush administration's decision to look the other way as Saddam Hussein's attack helicopters slaughtered Shiites in the south of Iraq. He seemed unmoved. It is not for nothing that he is called a "realist."

Now I, too, would like to become a realist -- if just for a day. I'd like to ask who among us is willing to fight to bring South Ossetia back into the Georgian fold? How about Abkhazia? These are the ethnic enclaves that Georgia claims and Russia -- not to put too fine a point on it -- supports. They are the immediate reasons for the recent war.

I ask my nasty little questions because it has been the policy of the current Bush administration to have Georgia as well as Ukraine admitted to NATO. This would mean that if either country got into a dust-up with its neighbor Russia, we would scramble the jets, stoke up the usual talk radio personalities and sally into yet another lovely war. Before this happens, can we at least debate whether this is a good idea? Cynic that I am, I have my doubts.

At the risk of sounding wishy-washy -- a cable news synonym for thoughtful -- I have not yet arrived at a position. I can see the virtue of NATO membership -- NATO's insistence on certain democratic standards, for instance -- and I don't for a moment think that every Russian objection has to be taken into account and honored. But the differences between Poland and the Czech Republic on one hand and Ukraine and Georgia on the other are considerable. The latter two either have the sort of ethnic troubles that have caused war after war in Europe or cannot yet be considered stable democracies.

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