Four months after the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Russian Army still sits Abkhazia and South Ossetia; Russia has recognized them as secessionist states; Georgia’s territorial integrity is no longer intact; and it survives as a truncated state, relying on international assistance.
At her December 1 roundtable, Sec. Rice nevertheless argued the U.S. has achieved its goals:
“. . . the key for us was to come out of this crisis in Georgia with Georgian democracy intact, with the Georgian economy intact, with Georgian territorial integrity intact. And it’s not intact, but it’s also not recognized by anybody – the secessionists are not recognized by anybody — and to make clear to Russia that this kind of behavior was, in the 21st century, not just unacceptable, but not very fruitful. And I think we achieved all of those goals.”
Well, let’s roll the videotape back four months, to August 11, 2008, with President Bush speaking in the Rose Garden, calling Russia’s invasion “unacceptable” and demanding that Russia withdraw its forces and respect Georgia’s territorial integrity:
“Russia’s government must respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. The Russian government must reverse the course it appears to be on, and accept this peace agreement [an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of forces from the zone of conflict, a return to the military status quo as of August 6th, and a commitment to refrain from using force] as a first step toward resolving this conflict.”
At the time, JCI noted that the key observer in this situation was actually Iran:
which has heard its nuclear weapons program repeatedly deemed “unacceptable” by the U.S. in the past, and will now watch with interest what consequences flow from President Bush’s decision yesterday to term Russia’s invasion of a neighboring state and threatening a democratic government “unacceptable.”
John Bolton used to say that what President Bush meant by “unacceptable” was that it was unacceptable, but more recently
Bolton
Iran
Via Dennis Ross in this week’s Newsweek, we now know what Iran thinks about what happened in Georgia. Ross reports that Iran is “throwing its weight around” using this argument:
One Arab ambassador told me recently that the Iranians are reminding Arab leaders that America didn’t help Fuad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, or Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, when they got into trouble – that in fact Washington left them high and dry. Iran, by contrast, is close by and not going anywhere.
In one of his first statements as president-elect, Barack Obama has called the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons “unacceptable.” One wonders whether his understanding of that term is the same as Condoleezza Rice’s, and – more importantly – what Iran thinks when it hears it.
The answer may determine the outcome of Obama’s “first – and perhaps defining – foreign policy test.”