Landay: Bush Warned Georgia

It’s possible that Jonathan Landay’s story about the US role in the Russia-Georgia conflict is just a case of retroactive Bush administration CYA but, frankly, given the record that Landay and McClatchy have put together over the years I seriously doubt it. He reports that far from having encouraged Mikhail Saakashvili to escalate tensions with Russia, the administration repeatedly tried to get them to show restraint:

Bush administration officials, worried by what they saw as a series of provocative Russian actions, repeatedly warned Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to avoid giving the Kremlin an excuse to intervene in his country militarily, U.S. officials said Monday.

If so, that certainly makes the Bush administration look somewhat less culpable for this mess than the public record would indicate. On the other hand, as Kevin Drum notes this story makes the administration’s enthusiasm for expanding NATO to include Georgia all the more baffling. If you have an ally who you feel you need to restrain from taking ill-advised aggressive actions, that’s the kind of ally you want to avoid extending unconditional security guarantees to. Indeed, I get the sense that a lot of US politicians have gotten into the bad habit of taking bad-faith positions on Georgia’s NATO status, counting on Germany and France to block membership. People who don’t necessarily actually want America to guarantee Georgia’s security do want the United States to propose such a guarantee, thus putting us on the right side of the “moral clarity” line, while letting our European allies take the blame for the costs of pragmatism.