Georgia's president asked U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday for advanced U.S. weaponry, military aid and unarmed observers to monitor a cease-fire along the boundaries of two Moscow-backed breakaway regions, a senior U.S. official said.
Biden made no promises of any U.S. military assistance, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Georgia specifically asked for anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, he said.
Russia strongly opposes any rearmament of Georgia and reiterated Thursday in Moscow that it would reduce or halt military cooperation with any country supplying Russian arms to Georgia, an apparent threat to Ukraine.
Biden emphasized to President Mikhail Saakashvili that military force should not be used to retake control of the two breakaway regions at the center of last year's war with Russia, and warned against taking any actions that could provoke a Russian military response, the official said.
But as I've also commented on, we rightly want Georgia to abandon concrete plans to recapture Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Russia.
This doesn't mean Russia's conquest has to be legally recognized. We never recognized the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic states and now they are NATO members. But we won't let Georgia into NATO just to have them drag us into a war with Russia by attacking Russia to liberate their lost lands.
I'm fairly shocked that we haven't supplied Georgia with defensive weapons already, but perhaps we still need to get iron clad Georgian guarantees that they will not use those weapons to try to reverse their August 2008 losses (but remember that those regions were de facto lost long before Russia formalized the loss in August 2008).
If the Georgians are stuck on regaining all their lands with the protection of America, they need to understand the limits of our friendship--and do it fast. Russia likely knows that they have a potential window to attack (one we wish to minimize with our words and deeds) without triggering a bigger war that closes once Georgia is in NATO.
