Posted on August 22, 2008 - by Venik

US Confirms It Knew of Georgia’s Plan to Attack South Ossetia

In its August 22 issue, the Russian business daily Kommersant published the interview with the new US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrly. As should have been expected of an experienced diplomat, Ambassador Beyrly said a lot about nothing. Although he did bring up a couple of points worth mentioning. John Beyrly is a fluent Russian speaker and the interview was conducted in Russian.

“We see that the response by the Russian forces to the attack against Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia was well founded,” said Beyrly. (“Мы видим, что российские войска вполне обоснованно ответили на нападение на миротворцев РФ в Южной Осетии.”) Ambassador Beyrly went on to say that it was the move into Georgia proper by the Russian forces that the US found unacceptable.

When asked if the US supported Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia, Beyrly responded: “The fact that, to the last moment we urged the Georgian side not to take this step, clearly shows that we did not want for any of this to happen.” (“Тот факт, что мы очень настойчиво убеждали грузинскую сторону не идти на этот шаг, ясно говорит о том, что мы не хотели, чтобы все это произошло.”) Incidentally, a few days ago the US Ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, told the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs: “Including the day before Georgian troops went into South Ossetia, we said, ‘don’t do it, don’t be drawn into a military conflict, it’s not in your interests.”

Why are these statements important? A couple of reasons. First, by saying that Russia’s military response was “well founded”, the US distances itself from Saakashvili’s regime. The US position seems contradictory: on the one hand we have noisy proclamations of support for the Georgian president and on the other hand – at least a partial approval of Russia’s military action against Georgia. There is a good reason for all this vagueness and doublespeak on the part of the US Department of State. And this reason is simple enough: the US knew ahead of time that Georgia was planning to attack and did nothing to warn the Russians.

Chances are, Russia also knew about the planned attack. I don’t mean the exact timing and tactics, but Russia knew that the attack by Georgia against South Ossetia was likely, if not inevitable. However, it appears from the statements by Beyrly and Volker that the US might have had additional details about the planned attack. This should not be hard to believe, considering that the US military instructors were training Georgian soldiers and simply had to know the details of the planned operation of such considerable scale. Washington’s failure to contain its puppet in Tbilisi, as well the failure on the part of the US to warn Russia and South Ossetia, resulted in the deaths of over a dozen Russian peacekeepers and hundreds of South Ossetian civilians.

Avoiding responsibility and covering own ass are things Americans do best. Washington is talking tough but is afraid to ruin relations with Russia. American economy is not doing terribly well and the US military is already stretched to the limit. In a single day of trading at NYMEX oil prices jumped nearly $6 and commodities headed for their biggest weekly gain in 33 years. Most analysts cite tensions with Russia as the primary driving force behind these gains.

The sharp increase in the oil price is particularly interesting in light of a huge jump in crude inventories. The rule of thumb usually is that oil prices drop as inventory grows – you know, this whole supply and demand thing. During the week ending August 15 the increase of oil inventory was a whopping 9.4 million barrels, while the forecast called for a 1.7 million-barrel increase. In other words, we should have seen a moderate drop in oil prices and instead prices grew rapidly.

The EU is not doing much better. As G7 is heading for recession, nobody needs a confrontation with Russia. If you thought that Fannie May and Freddie Mac are messing up global economy, wait until the Kremlin starts pulling strings in the Middle East and in South America to disrupt oil supplies. This is the kind of excitement the US economy can do without.

And so, outgoing Bush wants to appear tough on Russia to save face and to pacify hardliners in Congress. The desire for toughness needs to be carefully balanced with the need to maintain decent relations with Moscow and not let the situation deteriorate into another cold war. It’s hard to be a hardliner without money.

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