The fog of war

Whose fault was it?

Aug 13th 2009
From Economist.com
Unravelling the Ossetia conflict, one year later

ONE year after the Georgian war, its outcome is as debatable as the cause. Depending on where you stand, the war can be seen as the sinister culmination of a systematic provocation by a neo-imperialist Russia or as a murderously aggressive gambit by a Caucasian strongman wrongheadedly backed by the West.

The truth is somewhere in between. Russia did systematically provoke Georgia in the months leading up to the war. Its military counter-attack was disproportionate. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that President Mikheil Saakashvili’s inner circle was badly penetrated by Russia, that decision-making processes were chaotic and amateurish, and that the move to retake the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali (pictured), played into his enemy’s hands.
EPA Whose fault was it?

With a detailed chronology of who did and decided what in the days and hours leading up to the war still (oddly) unavailable, an accurate assessment of the causes of war is still impossible.

Depending on where you stand, what happened next is similarly foggy. One variant is that Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, intervened with panache and elan to prevent catastrophe, brokering a ceasefire deal in a way that only a big European country could have done. From another viewpoint, Mr Sarkozy was a meddling egomaniac whose amateurism and self-importance gravely impeded the EU’s ability to intervene. People familiar with ceasefires in the Yugoslav wars certainly thought the documents he brought away from the talks with Vladimir Putin (and his sidekick-boss Dmitri Medvedev) were remarkably vague.

(Continued here.)