Georgia Tries out the Bush War Doctrine, Loses Badly

There are two basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin' little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.

2. They lost.

If you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian "peacekeepers" for the last few years.

The Georgians didn't like that. You don't give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can't resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan's army. They wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000 -- a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one on one, but you don't want to mess with them, and you especially don't want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what's the ending to this story? As in: How do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they'll react?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. It declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they claim difference by being Muslims. And being different means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that crap, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze, volunteered them to fight to the death for their independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colossus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region -- like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting -- like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force -- and it's a good one by all accounts -- didn't have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don't trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of explosives. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: Drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse -- truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you're out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that's a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn't even try to blast that tunnel. I don't go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there's usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it's the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don't get.