About Russia

The Georgian leadership, and indeed a whole generation of Georgians, tethered their hopes to George W. Bush and the hollow promises of his administration. Now at the moment of truth, Bush will almost certainly let them down. He has overextended America’s military presence around the world, whittling down America’s uniformed professional military just as he has undertaken two simultaneous wars. The Pentagon is telling Bush that he has stretched the nation’s fighting force perilously close to the breaking point. A conflict involving a major military power, like Russia, is beyond the realm of contemplation. Vice President Cheney, whose bellicose rhetoric has done much to provoke the problems now bubbling in the Caucasus, says that the Russian acts of aggression in Georgia “must not go unanswered.” But thanks to the serial strategic misadventures that make up Bush-Cheney foreign policy, there is little prospect of Russia’s actions being answered by a flex of military muscle of the United States or of NATO. Putin’s calculation is that an America bogged down in two conflicts in the Middle East will let him give the Georgians a whipping. Putin is probably right.

The world now enters a new phase. Russia has reasserted itself as a military power which will not tolerate backtalk and independence on the territory of its old imperium. The foreign policy and national security calculus of the United States and of Europe have just gotten much more complicated.

  Harpers

And if all that’s true, as it seems to be, then I’d say it was a damned sight stupid of Georgia’s president to pick now to jump into a military affair with South Ossetia.

And, unfortunately, I don’t think a conflict involving Russia is beyond the realm of contemplation for the likes of Cheney and Bush. Or McCain.

Still, Pooty Poot must be all smiles tonight.

Isn't it interesting, to borrow a Bush favorite, that while Condi and Crew were intent on worrying about Russia when they should have been concerned with al Qaeda at the beginning of the Bush Regime, now at the end of it, they have helped to create the situation they imagined existed then?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.