Georgia On My Mind

This past Monday I was reading Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other when I came across this passage on page 164:

Nothing is worse than for a state to have nearby enemies and distant friends – as the lonely experience of Armenia, Cuba, Taiwan, and Tibet attests. Adversaries loom daily on the horizon; far-off allies often pledge support that they cannot really provide, thereby ensuring that their friendship is as costly as it is undependable.

It is very timely observation considering what has transpired in the nation of Georgia since August 8. In that distant republic, neighboring Russia acted swiftly and brutally to ensure that the breakaway autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia would remain tied to Russia and that Georgia would be effectively cut off from her putative allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.

However, Hanson's observation was not in reference to Georgia or any modern nation, but to the ancient Greek city-state of Plataea:

The city of Plataea – like poor Poland squeezed between Germany and Russia – had the misfortune of resting on the border of powerful and hostile Thebes while miles away from stronger and friendly Athens.

Plataea occupies an exalted place in Greek history because of two major events. The first occurred on August 27, 479 BC, when the city-state was the site of one of the two final battles of the Greco-Persian Wars – the other being the Battle of Mycale, fought on the same day.

More relevant to Hanson's analysis is the later role Plataea played – in the Peloponnesian War. Plataea, despite its proximity to Thebes, had remained independent from the Theban-led Boeotian Confederacy for many decades by the time of the Peloponnesian War's outbreak in 431 BC. In 431, the Thebans had tried to topple Plataea from within by sneaking three hundred Thebans into the city to spark an insurgency that would overthrow Plataea's democratic government, but the Theban attempt at subterfuge failed. Two years later, in 429, the Spartans put Plataea under a siege that was to last for two years, until the starving 200 or so defenders of the embattled city-state (most of its residents having relocated to Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War) surrendered.

Hanson notes that Plataea's long independence was not maintained by the alliance with Athens, but rather by its formidable defenses:

In fact, for much of the latter fifth century the Plataeans owed their independence from Thebes' Boeotian Confederacy not to tangible Athenian military assistance or its strategic location on the main road into Attica. Instead, the backward state of Greek siegecraft meant that the city's impressive stone walls could still guarantee it autonomy from the entire Boeotian Confederacy – despite the latter's aggregate population of at least 100,00 people and nearly one thousand square miles of territory.

To break Plataea's defenses would require a well-executed plan, and as is often said in the realm of politics, you cannot win without a plan. To wit, war being politics by other means, Ralph Peters provides this cogent analysis of Russia's invasion of Georgia:

Let's be clear: For all that US commentators and diplomats are still chattering about Russia's "response" to Georgia's actions, the Kremlin spent months planning and preparing this operation. Any soldier above the grade of private can tell you that there's absolutely no way Moscow could've launched this huge ground, air and sea offensive in an instantaneous "response" to alleged Georgian actions.

As I pointed out Saturday, even to get one armored brigade over the Caucasus Mountains required extensive preparations. Since then, Russia has sent in the equivalent of almost two divisions - not only in South Ossetia, the scene of the original fighting, but also in separatist Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast.

The Russians also managed to arrange the instant appearance of a squadron of warships to blockade Georgia. And they launched hundreds of air strikes against preplanned targets.

Every one of these things required careful preparations. In the words of one US officer, "Just to line up the airlift sorties would've taken weeks."

The question facing the US government is this: just how far should we be willing to go to help Georgia's struggling democracy against a re-emergent Russia? In the early years of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians decided that Plataea was not worth a full defensive effort on their part, mostly because Athens was beset with a horrible plague that ended up killing anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the population, including Pericles, Athens' iconic leader. The United States has no plague to deal with at present, but given our commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the realities of physical distance may limit what assistance we may be able to provide to the beleaguered Caucasian country.