Gordon Hahn’s Comments on Pavel Felgenhauer, “'Eto byla ne spontannaya, splanirovannaya voina',” Novaya gazeta, No. 59, 14 August 2008. [See JRL #150, item 32]

Pavel Felgenhauer’s conspiracy theory has several major wholes in it. First of all, it relies on the false assumption that contingency plans constitute decided actions. This is the same mistake made by those who supported the various conspiracy theories surrounding the August 1991 party-siloviki putsch against Gorbachev and Yeltsin. More or less normal contingency plans for instituting emergency rule and martial law were loosely interpreted as plans to implement them at a soon-to-be-determined time and place.

Second, the entire Russian ‘plan’ would have been undone, if Saakashvili had agreed to sign the agreement proposed by Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia to reject the use of force to resolve Georgia’s self-made‘frozen conflicts.’ It was Saakashvili’s willingness to use force that allowed him, if he indeed was, to be sucked into using force. This means that he was as complicit as the Russians were in the frozen conflict’s thaw and devolution into violence. Both sides were spoiling for a fight and to one extent or another were doing their best to bait the other side into flagrantly breaking the ceasefire by way of a major incursion. In other words, it is unclear who entrapped whom. As usual a certain ilk of ‘analyst’ is willing to entertain this possibility in relation to the Russian side; for that ilk the Russians are always entirely to blame, and the West and whomever the present administration has designated an ally are not.

Felgenhauer mentions Russia's April tranfer of unarmed troops to Abkhazia to make repairs of the Abkhaz railroad for transport of Russian military equipment and the shooting down of the Israeli-suppled recon drones. He neglects to mention that if the railraod repairs were preparation for war, what were the recon flights for?

He mentions the Russian 58th army's maneuvers, but neglects the American-Georgian military excercies being conducted at the same time. One is seen as preparation for war, the other is ignored. Clearly both were intended as general preparation in the even of war. It is possible that niether or both were part of mobilization for an already planned attack. Felgenhauer neglects the fact that Georgian forces stepped up their activities and moved heavy artillery closer to Tskhinval during their maneuvers with U.S. forces. In RFERL writer Brian Whitmore's rehash of Felgenhauer's material he mentions that "(a)t center stage in the Russian maneuvers was...Russia's 58th Army, the very unit that would later play a key role in the incursion." This supposedly revealing 'coincdence' is intended to be further 'proof' that Russia had decidec on war. Omitted from Whitmore's piece is that any maneuvers in Russia's North Caucasus would include the 58th Army which is the nucleus of its military presence there and has been fighting Chechen separatists and Caucasus jihadists for years. American taxpayers might wonder why their hard-earned money is funding pro-Georgian propaganda by the "independent" organization "funded by the U.S. Congress"?!

Felgenhauer’s reliance on the conspiracy theories surrounding the Chechen jihadists’ long-planned invasion of Dagestan in 1999 further undermine his interpretation. The Russian did not need to goad jihadists like Shamil Basaev and global jihadist and al Qaeda operative Khattab to attack Dagestan. The Chechen and foreign jihadists had been conspiring with Dagestan jihadists’ for well over a year to establish an Islamic jamaat/caliphate in several Dagestani villages and months before their attack were declaring their intention to do so. The same conspiratorial approach surrounds that period’s Moscow and Volgadonsk apartment bombings, for which both Basaev and Khattab took responsibility by acknowledging that Dagestanis had carried it out.

These conspiracy theories are similar to those surrounding the Bush administration and Mossad and 9/11 and deserve about as much credence. That is why no semi-serious, no less serious analyst pays them much heed.

Dr. Gordon M. Hahn –Senior Researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program and Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group; and Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View – Russia Media Watch, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com. Dr Hahn is author of two well-received books, Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007) and Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002), and numerous articles on Russian politics.