WASHINGTON — Two top U.S. officials, confronting charges that the Bush administration sent mixed signals to Russia and Georgia before last month's conflict over separatist South Ossetia, said that both countries had been warned to avoid armed conflict.
But the officials also acknowledged in Senate testimony that the administration was still debating whether to take stronger action against Russia for its incursion into the Caucasus nation last month, focusing for now on the shorter-term goal of getting Russian troops to leave Georgia proper.
The testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee laid bare the multiple and occasionally conflicting pressures buffeting the administration over the Georgia crisis -- and revealed the U.S. government's struggle to form a coherent policy to deal with a newly assertive Kremlin even before hostilities broke out.
Appearing before the panel were Daniel Fried, the head of European affairs at the State Department, who dealt personally with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in the weeks leading up to the Russian incursion, and Eric Edelman, the head of policy at the Pentagon.
Democratic senators alternately accused the administration of failing to take stronger, concrete action against Russia for its military offensive and of inflammatory rhetoric that put at risk cooperation with Moscow on a range of U.S. foreign policy needs, including containing Iranian nuclear ambitions and thwarting terrorists.
Fried said measures such as excluding Russia from the World Trade Organization and the Group of 8 leading industrial nations were not "off the table" within the administration. But he said the U.S. was reluctant to inflame tensions while hoping that Russia would reverse direction in Georgia.
"First, let's get the Russian troops out," Fried said, when pressed on whether the U.S. would respond more concretely. "Let's help Georgia recover, stabilize itself, and let's think through very carefully the consequences for our relations with Russia, working with Europe."
Russian forces swept through two pro-Moscow breakaway republics and into Georgia proper last month after Georgian forces tried to retake one of them, South Ossetia. The West has been pressing Moscow to pull back its troops and return to the status quo before the clash, with a limited force of Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other separatist republic.
