Georgia: Who encouraged whom?

Kevin Drum does yeoman's work here in batting down the argument, frequently offered in recent days, that the Bush administration somehow encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili's reckless attack on South Ossetia:

Look: Saakashvili came to power on a Georgian nationalist platform of recovering Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He's been jonesing for an excuse to send troops in for years, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. Likewise, Putin has been eagerly waiting for an excuse to pound the crap out of him in return — again, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do.

Kevin correctly lists Kosovo and NATO enlargement among several "general" drivers of the conflict, but I would be more specific. Let's roll the tape.

When Western countries recognized Kosovo in February, then-President Vladimir Putin immediately threatened to do the same regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia and promised to deploy more "peacekeeping" troops there. And he made good on his warning in April, granting the two breakaway regions a status just short of official recognition.

The Georgians were duly provoked, and they got busy mobilizing troops and preparing fuel supplies. In May, Russia deployed troops to Abkhazia; Georgia's state minister warned that the two countries were "very close" to war. By August, volunteers were pouring into South Ossetia from southern Russia, and the two sides were trading fire. All the while, as Kevin points out, State Department officials were trying to convince Saakashvili to "stay cool."

Foolishly, he didn't, and here we are. But if anyone encouraged this conflict, it was Moscow, not Washington. If Saakashvili thought the U.S. military would come to his aid, then he's simply delusional -- there was no way it was going to happen.

On a broader level, the Bush administration made two key mistakes. The first was setting an awkward precedent in Kosovo. It would have been smarter to leave the situation ambiguous, like Taiwan. The second was in trying to bring Georgia into NATO prematurely. When in April, Germany and France delayed Georgia's membership action plan (MAP) until it had settled its internal conflicts, that was basically an invitation to Putin to destabilize the country. It would have been better not to push for a MAP at all.

In short, a naive and overconfident West has badly misjudged how Putin would respond to its diplomatic moves. That's the real problem here -- not some imagined whispering in Saakashvili's ear.