Only Two States Of Mind: War and Shooting War

The Georgians started this mess by invading South Ossetia, and the Russians absolutely turned around and unleashed the full fury of their military. Now, with Georgia calling for a cease-fire, the Russians have decided to make an example out of them. According to Robert Kagan, none of this matters.

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

Kagan's invocation of Godwin's Law is typical of neocon posturing. In this case, the end-state is... a war with Russia? Can that be?

Well, the US has started to fly Georgian troops home from Iraq. And Fourthbranch Cheney was rousted out of his bunker to say that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered." And the typical neocon organs are calling on the US to exert maximum pressure on Russia. So that's certainly where the rhetoric is headed. Not only don't we have the force strength to do that, but restarting the Cold War is about the only thing Bush hasn't done in his eight years in the White House.

It's worth understanding what happened prior to Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia and why Russia might want President Saakashvili out of power. There's an American angle here.

Let’s take a moment to consider this para from Doug’s (the Doug in Tbilisi, that is) first post.

"Second, what will the Americans and EU do? A senior State Department figure was here in Tbilisi last week, and I would expect that the Georgian side at least hinted very broadly about what was up. He would have to deny that, of course, in the way of these things. We can assume that the Americans did not warn them off."

The Americans have more or less encouraged Saakashvili’s dangerously confrontational approach to Russia, and have given them hopes of NATO membership, which was never going to happen. They may also have had unrealistic expectations about US support in the event of a war. This war would likely never have happened if the US had discouraged the Georgians.

The game has switched up now, but the Bushies were clearly encouraging Saakashvili in the way they encouraged all manner of revolutions against the Soviets throughout the Cold War. Now that it backfired horribly, they call for a cease-fire. And there ought to be a cease-fire, but let's not pretend about what caused this and why that matters.