Putin's Second War Can Have Only One Victor

For more than 200 years, tsars, generals, and politburos in Russia have controlled Georgia. But for the past 17 years since the collapse of the Soviet empire, the small country on the south side of the Caucasus has gingerly embraced a new experience as an independent state - unstable, immature, chaotic, corrupt, but hopeful.

Vladimir Putin cannot abide that notion and appears bent on trying to restore a version of the status quo ante.

"Russia has played a positive, stabilizing role in the Caucasus for centuries, a guarantor of security, cooperation and progress," the Russian prime minister said at the weekend. "This is how it was in the past and this is how it is going to be in future. Let there be no doubt about this."

By the time his 58th army, his air force, his spetsnaz paratroopers, and his Black Sea fleet are finished in Georgia, Putin knows where he wants to be. The Georgians, he said, "will objectively assess their current leaders" and their "criminal policies".

In other words, President Mikhail Saakashvili, wayward darling of the west, will either be much diminished or finished. Saakashvili thinks that's the whole point. "This is not about South Ossetia, this is not even about Abkhazia," the Georgian leader said. ""It's all about independence and democracy in Georgia. Putin is personally commanding this operation. The purpose is to depose the democratically elected government of Georgia."

A former Pentagon official long involved with Georgia agrees: "The strategic objective is regime change. Putin wants a puppet, a satrap. He is playing an extremely good game."

Georgia is Putin's second war. The first was launched nine years ago, also in August, in neighboring Chechnya at the beginning of Putin's rule and it entrenched him in power. The current campaign, at the start of President Dmitri Medvedev's term, marks a watershed - the first time the Russians have wielded their guns in anger beyond Russia's borders since the Soviet collapse and the end of the cold war.

Putin despised Saakashvili's predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president, as the man who gave away the Soviet Union. But his contempt for Saakashvili is much more intense.

Since the American-educated Georgian led the 2003 Rose Revolution, Putin has striven mightily to subvert Tbilisi - trade boycotts, embargoes on Georgian wine, fruit, and mineral water, deporting thousands of Georgians who run Moscow's vegetable markets, cutting transport links over and through the Caucasus, turning off the oil and gas and stopping the post.

It's personal. Saakashvili has been telling western officials and diplomats for months of a looming war and of a foul-mouthed exchange with Putin in April. Last month in Dubrovnik, the Georgian leader told senior US state department officials about the war plans and was warned there could be no military solution to the intricate ethnic conflicts of the Caucasus.

Saakashvili blundered. Perhaps he imagined he could pull a fast one in South Ossetia last week, perhaps he walked straight into a Russian trap. The results would be risible if not so tragic. His crack US-trained troops - a tenth of his army - took the Ossetian town of Tskhinvali and managed to hold it for all of three hours before being hammered by the Russians.

While George Bush watched baseball in Beijing, Putin created facts on the ground. European leaders rushed back from the beaches and villas of August for an "emergency meeting" in Brussels, while McCain and Obama used Georgia to sling mud at one another.

Saakashvili, who came to power pledging to recover control of Georgia's breakaway regions, has lost South Ossetia and Abkhazia, probably irretrievably, and will be much weakened.

Nicolas Sarkozy of France, in Moscow and Tbilisi today, will grandstand as peacemaker and offer to mediate. The Kremlin will dictate the terms of any negotiations and Putin will probably refuse to accept Saakashvili as a legitimate negotiating partner.

There is enough blame to go around. The Russians, the Georgians, the Europeans and the Americans are all responsible for the mess. There is only one victor, Vladimir Putin. If he succeeds in bringing down Saakashvili, it will be a greater victory yet, not only over Georgia, but over the west.