On the night of August 7, the dam broke. Despite Georgia’s unilateral ceasefire earlier in the day, South Ossetian rebel forces continued shelling ethnic Georgian villages in and around the capital, Tskhinvali. In response, the Georgian military commenced a heavy military offensive against the rebels after a senior Georgian military official declared that Tbilisi had decided to restore “constitutional order” in South Ossetia. Only thirty minutes after Georgia began its offensive, Russia came to the aid of the South Ossetian rebels, moving its 58th Army tanks through the Roki Tunnel into Georgian territory.
Dan Fried updated me throughout the night. I waited anxiously at my apartment on the morning of the eighth, trying to decide whether to go ahead to the Greenbrier. My family and friends had gathered for the trip by car to West Virginia and I was their ride, since my security detail could go only if they were taking me. The stranded vacationers sat in my living room eating turkey sandwiches while I tried to sort out the problem. After a little while, I decided to set out for the Greenbrier. I could always come back if I needed to.
Or … I could just stay on the telephone in my cabin. It was August, and, as Steve Hadley often put it, we were maldeployed. The President was attending the Olympic Games in Beijing, and Bob Gates was in Munich. The time difference with China made it difficult to conduct conference calls, but at least twice a day I talked with the President. He had found himself sitting next to Putin at the Olympic opening ceremonies, engaging in awkward conversations in which the Russian alternately accused the Georgians of genocide and feigned ignorance of what Russia’s troops were doing.
We decided that we didn’t want the conflict to become a U.S.-Russia row and that the European Union and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) should be actively involved in the diplomacy. I talked repeatedly to Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, and Alexander Stubb, the Finnish foreign minister and head of the OSCE, trying to guide the two of them toward a common message. I issued a statement calling on Russia to “cease attacks on Georgia by aircraft and missiles, respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and withdraw its ground combat forces from Georgian soil.”
By August 11 the Georgians claimed that they’d withdrawn their forces from South Ossetia. Frankly, the remoteness of the area made it hard to tell, and the information that we were receiving was mixed. We continued to pressure the Georgians to stop any military activities, hoping to remove any pretext for Moscow’s continued assault.
Then, that afternoon, Sergei Lavrov called me for the second time during the crisis. The first call had been largely a stream of invectives against the leadership in Tbilisi. But this time he was very calm. “We have three demands,” he said.
“What are they?” I asked.
“The first two are that the Georgians sign the no-use-of-force pledge and that their troops return to barracks,” he told me.
“Done,” I answered.
Saakashvili would have to swallow hard, but I was sure we could insist that he accept the Russian terms. But then Sergei said, “The other demand is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go.” I couldn’t believe my ears and I reacted out of instinct, not analysis.
“Sergei, the secretary of state of the United States does not have a conversation with the Russian foreign minister about overthrowing a democratically elected president,” I said. “The third condition has just become public because I’m going to call everyone I can and tell them that Russia is demanding the overthrow of the Georgian president.”
“I said it was between us,” he repeated.
“No, it’s not between us. Everyone is going to know.” The conversation ended. I called Steve Hadley to tell him about the Russian demand. Then I called the British, the French, and several others. That afternoon the UN Security Council was meeting. I asked our representative to inform the Council as well. Lavrov was furious, saying that he’d never had a colleague divulge the contents of a diplomatic conversation. I felt I had no choice. If the Georgians wanted to punish Saakashvili for the war, they would have a chance to do it through their own constitutional processes. But the Russians had no right to insist on his removal. The whole thing had an air of the Soviet period, when Moscow had controlled the fate of leaders throughout Eastern Europe. I was certainly not going to be party to a return to those days.
The next morning I gave up on any notion of a vacation and returned to Washington. The President was back from Beijing, and Steve was able to gather the NSC for a meeting. The session was a bit unruly, with a fair amount of chest beating about the Russians. At one point Steve Hadley intervened, something he rarely did. There was all kind of loose talk about what threats the United States might make. “I want to ask a question,” he said in his low-key way. “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?” That quieted the room, and we settled into a more productive conversation of what we could do.
Our sources of information were not very good, often filtered through the panicked Georgian political and military officials. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had established a link with the Russian chief of staff, largely to prevent any miscalculation between our forces. It was also a very useful channel to take the pulse of the Russians. French President Sarkozy had succeeded in negotiating a ceasefire, but the Russian forces seemed to be ignoring it. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Medvedev kept insisting that his forces had withdrawn when they hadn’t. The new Russian president didn’t seem to be on top of the situation. That was a problem too.
As we sat in the Situation Room, dark reports were coming from the Georgians that the Russian army was headed for Tbilisi, having forced the Georgian army out of Gori, a small town only forty miles west of the capital. Saakashvili kept calling the White House to say that his government was about to be overthrown. After the second desperate call, we decided that our friends needed visible help. We sent humanitarian supplies by military transport—a visible statement of support that might at least back Moscow off. And we decided that I’d go to Georgia.
Since the French were now leading the diplomacy, the President called Sarkozy and offered to send me to Paris too. The French president was in the south of the country and did not want to go back to the capital. So, on August 14, we met on the veranda of the magnificent presidential vacation home, Le Fort de Brégançon, in Bormes-les-Mimosas on the Mediterranean.
I asked Sarkozy how I could help. He explained that he needed the Georgians to sign the document that he’d negotiated, but that Saakashvili was hesitant. That was surprising since the Georgian had told President Bush that he just wanted the war stopped. Then I looked at the document and immediately saw the problem. The French had negotiated a “15 km security exclusion zone,” in which Russian troops would be permitted to stay for an unspecified period of time. Georgia isn’t very big, and the zone seemed to permit the invaders to occupy key roads in the country as well as the town of Gori, located only about sixty-four kilometers from Tbilisi.
I asked whether anyone had looked at a map to see what the zone covered. Much to the astonishment of our delegation, they hadn’t. Jean-David Levitte, who was Sarkozy’s advisor on foreign policy and a terrific diplomat, protested that the agreement could not possibly have that effect. “I will call our ambassador in Tbilisi and ask him about the geographic limitations,” he said. The chagrined Levitte came back to say that the consequences of the exclusion zone were exactly as we’d feared.
Now the question was how to save French diplomacy from its own mistake and end the war. We agreed that Sarkozy would write a letter to both Saakashvili and Medvedev that was specific this time about what the exclusion zone meant and how long the Russian forces could stay. I’d take that letter to the Georgians and get their agreement. We took advantage of Chancellor Merkel’s meeting in Sochi with the Russian president to secure Moscow’s final consent.
When I arrived in Tbilisi, it was easy to see the stress on the faces of the Georgian leaders. They loo
ked so young—indeed, the oldest was about forty—and they were really tired, having failed to sleep for several days. We met in Saakashvili’s office, the television blaring in the background. When I handed him the letter, he asked if they could have a moment to look it over. “Take as much time as you want,” I said. There was an audible sigh of relief.
“The French just gave us the paper and said sign it,” Eka Tkeshelashvili, the foreign minister, said. Though I doubted that it had been exactly like that, I was determined to take some of the pressure off of them.
“We’ll work through it together, but get your lawyers to look it over carefully,” I said.
Finally we had an agreement. I asked Dan Fried to call Jean-David Levitte to see how it was going in Moscow. The two went back and forth on the phone as I was talking with Saakashvili and his senior advisors. After intense work on both sides, the agreement was signed, though it would be several more days before their forces complied with the terms and Russian forces never completely withdrew to their pre-conflict positions. And even then, two weeks after we announced the agreement, Moscow would declare Abkhazia and South Ossetia independent, further exacerbating the hostility between Georgia and Russia.
Saakashvili and I walked outside to meet the press. It was unbearably hot in Tbilisi, and I was anticipating a short encounter. I was also worried about the capricious, emotional, and exhausted Georgian president and what he might say. “Mr. President, just thank the Europeans and the Americans for standing with you. Say something encouraging to your people about ending the war. Leave any comment about the Russians to me,” I said.
The press conference began smoothly, but as he kept speaking, I could see that the Georgian’s blood pressure was starting to rise. With halting speech he continued, as if trying to decide what to say next. Saakashvili speaks wonderful English, so I knew that wasn’t the problem. All of a sudden his language became aggressive. He started calling the Russians barbarians and claimed their tanks were “on a roll” and would not stop. Okay, I thought, I expected some tough words to the Russians. We’re still all right. Then he started in on the Europeans, referencing Munich and appeasement. Oh no! What is he doing?
After he finished his twenty-minute tirade I tried to repair the damage by explaining the French participation in the ceasefire and exhorting the Russians to end the conflict. Time to get out of here, I decided. The press conference ended. I was so mad at Saakashvili that I couldn’t even speak. I shook his hand and got into the car with Eka, the foreign minister, for the short ride to a hospital to visit victims of the war. “He’s blown it,” I told her. Eka arranged for us to give a last-minute press statement at the airport, where we both thanked the Europeans before I left.
We held a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels a few days after the agreement was signed. I found the allies surprisingly charitable toward Saakashvili, but a few did say that he had demonstrated why MAP for Georgia was not a good idea. I tried to keep the focus on the Russian transgressions, and indeed the NATO-Russia Council was suspended indefinitely for their incursion into Georgia. The Alliance issued a declaration of its support for Georgia and called on Russia to remove its troops from the area. Most important, NATO reiterated its intention to “support the territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty of Georgia and to support its democratically elected government and to deny Russia the strategic objective of undermining that democracy.” The next day, I went to Poland to sign a missile defense agreement. I didn’t intend to send a message to Russia; the time had simply come. But it was, of course, taken that way. Partially that was due to the Poles’ perception of the situation, not ours. The Russo-Georgian conflict had a huge effect on Poland—the Polish public was alarmed and worried about Russian aggression as a result of what had happened to Georgia. So while we went to Poland to sign the missile defense agreement regardless of the conflict, the Polish public shifted public perception of the intention of the agreement to defense against Russian aggression.
Moscow paid a price for its invasion of Georgia, largely because the Kremlin overreached. There was a lot of anger at Saakashvili, whom many Europeans accused of provoking the crisis. But Lavrov’s insistence that the Georgian president must be removed was a bridge too far. Moscow could still invade a small neighbor and defeat its army as in the old days. But it could no longer march to the capital and overthrow the government. And the integration of Russia’s economy into the international system turned out to be a constraint as well. The Russian stock market appeared to have been punished viciously for the instability the Kremlin had caused, necessitating the suspension of trading on the exchange for two days.
At the UNGA a month later, Sergei Lavrov and I met for the first time since the war. “Sergei,” I told him in private, “you did what I could never have done. You made Misha Saakashvili the darling of the international community. Now the Georgians have more reconstruction money than they can spend [$1 billion], and your troops are stuck in South Ossetia with the resounding diplomatic support of Hamas and Nicaragua.” The press was all over us, wondering if our relationship had survived the events in Georgia. At our meeting we agreed to pass a Security Council resolution on Iran simply reaffirming past resolutions. The reason was to send a signal to Iran that the Georgian war had not caused us to abandon our joint efforts toward Tehran. It was never quite the same, but we managed to work together for the rest of our term. Nonetheless, I’m sure Lavrov looked forward to the arrival of another team in Washington.
It was a rather bitter end to what had been a hopeful start for U.S.-Russia relations at that first meeting in Slovenia. I gave a speech at the German Marshall Fund in Washington that September to put it all in perspective. Essentially I reminded the world of all we’d done to reach out to Moscow and some of our cooperative efforts. But the problem, I told my audience, lay in Russia’s inability to come to terms with the post–Cold War order. The relationship hadn’t fallen apart around Iran, North Korea, or arms control. We had achieved good cooperation in the Middle East and excellent collaboration in the fight against terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The problem had to do with the Russian periphery and former sphere of influence. Moscow believed that it still had special privileges on the territory of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. We believed that the newly independent states had the right to choose their friends and their alliances. That had turned out to be an irreconcilable difference.
53
CEMENTING KEY RELATIONSHIPS WITH IRAQ AND INDIA
I RETURNED TO BAGHDAD on August 21 to try to solidify the terms of a status of forces agreement, as well as an accompanying strategic framework agreement, which would set the foundation for our long-term bilateral relationship with a fully sovereign Iraq. The United States signs status of forces agreements, or SOFAs, with foreign countries to define the parameters under which our military is able to maintain a presence within their jurisdictions. The President wanted to regularize our presence in Iraq in anticipation of major U.S. troop withdrawals, first from the cities and towns and then from the rest of the country. The draft agreement with Iraq was almost done when I arrived, but Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had balked at some of the language that granted immunity to U.S. troops from Iraqi law. Given that our forces were already subject to strict codes of conduct and a system of military justice, we believed adamantly that no U.S. soldier should be subject to Iraq’s nascent judicial system, even when off duty or outside U.S. military bases. Our SOFAs with other countries differed somewhat on that point, but there was simply no other way to protect our forces from misplaced reprisals in Iraq’s underdeveloped legal structures.
The other major issue was what we’d say about timetables for eventual withdrawal. Maliki was facing nationalist pressures and needed, for political reasons, to be able to say that all U.S. forces would be gone by a specific deadline: the end of 2011. The Iraqis had already been taking on more responsibility for security and would assume full control over Al Anbar province on September 1. Bu
t we’d hoped to avoid setting a firm date for departure in order to allow conditions on the ground to dictate our decisions. Some also expressed concern that a firm date might give an impression of being driven out of the country. There were many arduous negotiating sessions between their team and ours, which was led by Brett McGurk, the senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan at the National Security Council. But we couldn’t come to an agreement.
When I went to see Maliki in August, I left thinking our team had nailed down the final details of the language. If the security situation remained stable, the United States was prepared to remove all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2011 but leave a contingent force of as many as 40,000 soldiers to assist the Iraqis with training and logistics. However, when I got back to Washington, he reneged, calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011.
The process of negotiating the agreement was arduous. Every time the consensus failed inside the Iraqi political system, Maliki asked for more concessions. The President swallowed hard but pushed forward; he, more than anyone else, saw the strategic significance of the agreement.
Eventually we found suitable language, and Maliki, against pretty tough odds, was able to pass both the SOFA and the strategic framework agreement through his parliament. We’d given quite a lot of ground on issues such as a withdrawal timetable, consenting to the removal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011, and we even conceded a limited level of Iraqi legal jurisdiction over our troops in cases of certain “grave premeditated felonies” when such crimes occurred off-duty and off-base. Ultimately, the compromises we made proved beneficial because the resulting SOFA put the end of the war in sight and left the new U.S. President a firm foundation for a successful conclusion of our presence there.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 82