Roll Out The Aluminum Tubes

In the days after the successful talks between Western powers and Iran, which yielded more in one day than eight years of threats by the Cheney Administration, those who profit off of belligerence and confrontation with the world had clearly circled the wagons and planted their stories in the nation's newspapers. If people got the idea that Iran was moving toward cooperation, why, what would the foreign policy "establishment" that thrives off of conflict and military deployment do? Where would the next enemy be found? It's very bad for business.

So out came the links. Helene Cooper typed up the fears of anonymous officials wondering if the agreements in the first round of talks, including a deal where Iran would ship its enriched uranium to Russia to ensure that it would be used for peaceful purposes, were just a tactic by the Iranians to "buy time." Practically the same article popped up in the LA Times, as "experts and government officials" questioned whether the timeline for IAEA inspectors to visit the recently revealed facility at Qom represented another stall tactic. Amid this suspicion, neocon emeritus Elliott Abrams surmised that Iranians would not oppose a military attack on their own country, because there's nothing dissidents enjoy more than bombs raining on their heads (the reformers don't want sanctions either, it will hurt ordinary Iranians rather than the ruling regime). And today, this bombshell is splashed across the New York Times:

Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.

But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.

Two years ago, American intelligence agencies published a detailed report concluding that Tehran halted its efforts to design a nuclear weapon in 2003. But in recent months, Britain has joined France, Germany and Israel in disputing that conclusion, saying the work has been resumed.

A senior American official said last week that the United States was now re-evaluating its 2007 conclusions.

I don't know why this is news. Three years ago, under pressure from House Republicans, the Bush Administration posted documents revealing how to build a nuclear bomb on the Internet. Even this article presumes that Iran received the nuclear knowledge from "external sources," most likely Pakistan's godfather of the atomic bomb A. Q. Khan. The NYT wrote about Khan giving nuclear secrets to Iran in March 2005, and in that story, it was floated that Khan and Iran discussed trading knowledge in 1987. (Meanwhile, Khan has been set free by our ally Pakistan.) This is an old, old story, resurrected just when diplomatic efforts to defuse the conflict are moving forward.

In reality, Iran has agreed to allow the UN to visit the facility at Qom, have set a date of October 25 for that inspection, and the IAEA has described a "shift to cooperation" in the Iranian stance. The President's national security advisor has called the efforts at cooperation significant and said things are moving in the right direction.

Just as a successful universal health care system would doom the Republicans, a successful negotiation on nonproliferation would doom the neocon vision that you cannot talk to adversaries and only force is advisable and just. So they plant stories with unproven allegations about secret uranium stocks. They even had to go to Canada to drop one rumor:

Iran has tried to acquire materials for a nuclear weapon in Canada, according to a top official in Canada's Border Services Agency.

George Webb, head of the agency's Counter Proliferation Section, says customs officers have seized centrifuge parts (centrifuges are used to enrich uranium) and electronic components for bombs and guidance systems.

Webb made the claims in a story published Thursday in Canada's National Post [...]

The article, however, offers nothing to corroborate Webb's claims and reports them without even a hint of skepticism, except to say that "The devices can be used in peaceful nuclear plants but are also required to produce nuclear weapons" and to note that there have been few arrests and no convictions in connection with Webb's far-reaching claims.

But skepticism is merited. The government claims and breathless media reporting – without adequate evidence – that Iran is a grave and looming threat is reminiscent of the same claims and media coverage in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as several commentators have pointed out. Remember Saddam Hussein's horde of yellowcake uranium?

These allegations aren't coming from the Office of The Vice President this time, at least not yet. But they are out there, the neocons are desperate to hold off anything resembling peace, and sadly the media isn't always appropriately skeptical of the claims. Arm yourself with the facts. Juan Cole's list of things you know about Iran that are not true is a good start.

Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred Soldiers

According to Tom Andrews, the McChrystal strategy in Afghanistan would need just under that many to carry out the mission:

Embedded in General Stanley McChrystal's classified assessment of the war in Afghanistan is his conclusion that a successful counterinsurgency strategy will require 500,000 troops over five years.

This bombshell was dropped by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday:

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way. [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]

Spencer Ackerman cautions against reading too much into the numbers, saying that they would include Afghan Army and police boots on the ground, which in McChrystal's ultimate vision reaches 400,000. So we're talking about 100,000 coalition troops for five years, which roughly correlates to current levels. However, the Afghan security forces that make up 4/5 of this commitment, which is aspirational and not concrete at the moment, are 90% illiterate, frequently desert their posts and simply cannot be relied upon as a fighting force.

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn't the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to "operate independently," but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of "Basic Warrior Training" 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

In addition, maintaining a 400,000-strong security force would probably take three times the gross national product of the country at a minimum. It's naive to the extreme to assume that the Afghans will live up to the 400,000 end of the bargain, and similarly to assume that McChrystal would not seek reinforcements from American troops should the Afghan security forces falter. Putting the number 400,000 Afghan security forces on a piece of paper and expecting them to deliver in any meaningful way is as silly as expecting that they have a legitimate government to defend.

Which means that US military might and treasure will get dragged in once again to another futile war, with an escalation bringing mostly destruction to Afghanistan instead of development. It is for this reason - and maybe others - that the President may be rethinking such a commitment. Dan Froomkin has a superb post about how the President could actually lead on this issue by changing his mind.

Should Obama actually change his mind about Afghanistan, our elite journalists -- obsessed as they are with how the game is played -- will almost inevitably characterize this as vacillation and declare it a sign of political weakness. But that really misses the point.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that over the last several months, what's emerged when it comes to Afghan policy is a sort of consensus of the realists -- from across the political spectrum. The consensus: That our national interests in Afghanistan are pretty limited and that the harder we try to change things over there, the more resistance we face; that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, has become a Vietnam-like quagmire where escalation only leads to more escalation, not victory; and that what little we could possibly accomplish there is not worth more American blood [...]

Another important thing that could happen here is that, by fully explaining his decision, Obama could go a long way toward restoring a balanced and rational sense of what it means to "support the troops." Former president George W. Bush and his political henchmen used that phrase as a bludgeon to beat Democrats into submission on any issue even vaguely related to national security -- even when it actually resulted in putting the troops in greater danger. Most notably, Bush insisted that once troops had been committed to Iraq, he bore the responsibility to make sure they had not died in vain -- and that anything short of victory would be a betrayal of those soldiers who had already made the ultimate sacrifice. Democrats were way too terrified to demand a pullout from Iraq, even when they controlled Congress, for fear of being accused of undercutting our brave fighting men and women.

It would be a sign of strength and not weakness to base strategy on the available evidence, and change it when the evidence points in that direction. It may not get you far in the Washington commentariat and foreign policy establishment, where only bombing countries to smithereens and sending in every able-bodied man and woman in America halfway around the world are seen as serious and acceptable options. But it would reflect strength, nonetheless.

The McChrystal troop request should reach the Pentagon within days. So we'll see if the President bends to the will of the neocon-establishment complex, or makes his own assessment. The shitstorm that would ensue if he nixes the counter-insurgency strategy would make the health care town halls look like (actual) tea parties. So Froomkin's take provides a response that will need to be echoed.

Neocons Go To Work

I had forgotten about the modern-day equivalent of the Project for a New American Century, called the "Foreign Policy Initiative" (can you get more anodyne)? Their existence is solely to pressure Barack Obama on foreign policy from the neocon right, and to pat him on the forehead when he performs in ways aligned with their beliefs. They did a little of both of this with this letter asking for a "properly resourced" war effort in Afghanistan (that means a massive escalation):

The letter’s signatories write: “The situation in Afghanistan is grave and deteriorating…Since the announcement of your administration’s new strategy, we have been troubled by calls for a drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan and a growing sense of defeatism about the war. With General McChrystal expected to request additional troops later this month, we urge you to continue on the path you have taken thus far and give our commanders on the ground the forces they need to implement a successful counterinsurgency strategy. There is no middle course. Incrementally committing fewer troops than required would be a grave mistake and may well lead to American defeat. We will not support half-measures that repeat the errors of the past.”

In addition to the usual suspects, the Kristols, Cliff Mays, Peter Wehners and Randy Scheunemanns of the world, Sarah Palin has signed on, clearly signaling her alignment with the neocons.

As Jeremy Scahill notes, this is exactly analogous to what the PNAC types did to Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

The neoconservative Project for a New American Century laid much of the groundwork for the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Its members received important postings in the White House, Department of Defense and other institutions. But what is seldom mentioned is that PNAC achieved its first great political victory during the Clinton administration when PNAC pushed Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. In January 1998, the group wrote to Clinton: “[Y]ou have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” The Iraq Liberation Act, backed overwhelmingly by Democrats and Republicans and signed by Clinton, made regime change in Iraq official US policy and set the course for the eventual invasion and occupation.

And surely we all remember the alibi for starting war in Iraq that "Democrats agreed to and Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998!"

This is exactly the pincer movement that FPI is attempting with Obama. His Afghanistan policy has shrinking support among liberals, and so the neocons are among his only supporters. And of course, those neocons will only be pleased with a full escalation of the kind we had in Vietnam. So if Obama continues with involvement in Afghanistan, his most vocal supporters are pushing the debate severely to the right.

Neocons always do this. Under a Republican President, they waltz into the White House and make a mess of things. Under a Democrat, they head underground, prod and push from the right, and support the President when he accedes to their views, aloowing that President to claim bipartisan support (along with partisan Obama defenders) and allowing the neocons to control policy even when out of power. As Steve Hynd notes, the FPI letter urges Obama to "reverse the errors of previous years," when they were responsible for those errors.

If you lay down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas. It's time to begin drawing bright lines in the Af/Pak debate. The Obama administration and its neoliberal interventionist supporters have aligned themselves with the neocons, the instigators of so much atrocious American foreign policy. That bipartisan consensus of hawks is opposed by another bipartisan consensus of progressives and realist conservatives who oppose escalation, and by the bulk of the American public.

Progressives need to start asking themselves if they're at all comfortable with Obama's allies.

Indeed.

Maybe The Baby Doesn't Want To Be Adopted

The Mustache of Understanding has some decent things to say about Afghanistan, but they boil down to "if we are going to engage in nation-building we'd better have a pretty good government to work with. The assumption being that some nation-building projects can work, which befits the neocon-in-sheep's-clothing that is Tom Friedman.

But Afghanistan is so corrupt, so desperate, with our partner so ineffectual, that even the Mustache cannot abide by engaging in a decade-long experiment to bring them freeance and peeance. But Friedman comes to no conclusion, however, instead offering the evasive technique of calling for "debate."

That is the raw clay for our state-building. It may still be worth doing, but one thing I know for sure, it must be debated anew. This is a much bigger undertaking than we originally signed up for. Before we adopt a new baby — Afghanistan — we need to have a new national discussion about this project: what it will cost, how much time it could take, what U.S. interests make it compelling, and, most of all, who is going to oversee this policy?

I feel a vast and rising ambivalence about this in the American public today, and adopting a baby you are ambivalent about is a prescription for disaster.

The missing ingredient to Friedman's calculation is the desires of the Afghan people themselves. But when has he ever concerned himself with what the lower orders want?

...It is significant, as James Joyner says, that Tom Friedman appears to have given up on the war. But he just can't bring himself to say it's not worth fighting.

The China Syndrome

There's been a serious and ongoing uprising in Western China, between Muslim Uighurs and Chinese police. Apparently the police killed at least 150 people in the capital of Xinxiang Province, Urumqi, with thousands of injuries and even more arrests. The tensions between the ethnic majority Uighurs in this region and the Chinese government have long been known, and after years of cultural and political repression, things are spilling over.

In fact, the reason why the group of 17 Uighurs at Guantanamo could not be sent to China is because of pretty much this outcome - they would have been persecuted and possibly tortured. However, Andy McCarthy at NRO hears "Uighurs" and "riots" and decides to spin out this marvel:

The Wall Street Journal (as flagged in the NRO web briefing) reports on rioting in China by Uighur "students" that has left scores dead and hundreds wounded. The "students," described elsewhere in the story as from a "predominantly Muslim ethnic group[, which has] long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent," expressed their dissent by torching cars and buses, as well as — according to accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media — rampaging "with big knives stabbing people" on the street.

No reason for non-Muslims in Bermuda, Palau, or the United States to worry, though. The lovable Uighurs are merely trying to address "economic and social discrimination." Once they get social justice, I'm sure they'll stop.

McCarthy decides that state-run media reports in China are credible enough to just regurgitate. And neoconservatives like McCarthy, who used to praise the stirrings of democracy in totalitarian regions, let that go when political points can be scored against a Democratic President.

Remarkable.

Back To The Well

Bill Kristol responded to Susan Boyle's loss on Britain's Got Talent by calling for strategic bombing in London. No, wait, this time it was North Korea, actually.

Kristol explained, "I don't rule out the possibility of us deciding -- and I think it might be wise for us to decide -- to knock out a few. They're apparently rolling a long-term missile to a base to test another one, long-range missile to test another one. You know, it might be worth doing some targeted air strikes to show the North Koreans, instead of always talking about, 'Gee, there could be consequences,' to show that they can't simply keep going down this path."

Brit Hume, on the same program, endorsed Kristol's proposal, but said he "can't imagine" the Obama administration actually launching a military strike on North Korea.

Matt Yglesias noted, "Kristol doesn't even attempt to say what he thinks this will accomplish. He just kind of tosses it out there for no reason because arguing that the United States should start wars is what he does."

Kristol and his merry band of he-men think that the United States can drop bombs on any nation it chooses without consequences. This is despite the fact that never in human history has such a consequence-free imperialism ever come to pass. If we "targeted" air strikes on North Korea (10, 20 million dead, depending on the breaks), they would bomb Seoul. And kill a lot of people. Indiscriminate projection of military force has brought us through failed wars over the past several decades and the death of hundreds of thousands. Bill Kristol views this as an inconvenience.

Besides, Robert Farley makes the point I've made for years. North Korea doesn't have a lot of money, and apparently their fissile material is finite. Every bomb they test equals one less bomb they have. So go ahead and test! You know how much kimchee they have to sell to scrounge up the cash for another weapon?

We Are All Georgian Protesters Now

Well, well, well.

Remember last summer, when Russia and Georgia waged war over two breakaway republics? Pretty much every five minutes on cable news you'd see Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the US-educated darling of the neocons, who played the perfect martyr for his people. He was seen as the benevolent leader gallantly facing down the Russian Bear. John McCain almost immediately picked up his struggle and termed it "the most severe international crisis since the Cold War," and pledged American solidarity with the Georgian people.

Does McCain still agree, now that the people want Saakashvili removed from office?

They crammed into the streets by the tens of thousands Thursday, students and pensioners and merchants. They stood on the same scrap of ground, in front of the Stalinist stone hulk of the Georgian parliament building, demanding democracy and screaming the same slogan: Tzadi! (Go!)

This time, adoring crowds were not gathered to sweep the young, flamboyant Mikheil Saakashvili to power. Little more than five years after they cheered the U.S.-backed politician into the presidency, people returned with an air of disgust, in the hope of shaming him into a resignation.

Saakashvili is besieged by protest in his own capital, with a broad consortium of opposition figures -- including some former members of his government and onetime political allies -- vowing to keep the crowds in the street until he steps down. Opposition leaders insulted and reviled the president Thursday, calling him a coward and a womanizer and mocking his moments of public fear [...]

Against a backdrop of growing popular disaffection, Saakashvili's presidency has been punctuated by moments of scandal. His government has shut down critical news media, beaten and tear-gassed peaceful demonstrators, and, most disastrously, charged into an ill-advised war with Russia that in effect left Georgia's two breakaway republics under Russian occupation.

The Bush Administration basically propped up this guy when he swept into power, and he immediately became dictatorial in the name of democracy. And while the protests are partially a function of the economic crises gripping Eastern Europe, they also betray a personal enmity for this guy made the symbol of the people here in the US during that conflict with Russia.

The people beg to differ.

Israel Sticks Their Thumb In Obama's Eye

Barack Obama's historic outreach to Iran signals a US-led effort to re-engage the world and settle differences through constructive diplomacy rather than divisiveness and belligerence. The problem for this prospect is the continued structures throughout the would that will resist it. Case in point, Israel. MJ Rosenberg's compelling analysis suggests that Shimon Peres intentionally undermined the Obama message to Iran.

Yesterday, when the New York Times inexplicably gave Shimon Peres' insulting message to Iran equal play with President Obama''s, I thought it might be no coincidence.

Peres, who is an uberhawk on Iran, suddenly sends "greetings" to the Iranian people urging them to rise up against their government at the same moment that Obama respectfully addressed the "Islamic Republic of Iran" with the most conciliatory US message in decades. Coincidence? Maybe.

Of course, the Iranians would not view it that way. They would see America and Israel playing "good cop, bad cop," diminishing the effect of Obama's remarkable overture.

I hear that the White House is furious.

Today's Times reports that when asked about the Israeli move, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "I know we notified our allies about our message last evening," saying he did not know if the Israelis had been notified.

Of course, they were. No other ally is as concerned about Iran as Israel so Jerusalem must have been at the top of the list of those notified.

Given the prevailing belief in the Muslim world that Israel and the United States speak with one voice, Peres' message nullifies, at least in part, Obama's. The distraction is obvious. And we're just a few weeks away from an even more conservative, more hardline government in Israel than the current one. Needless to say, the neocons are thrilled because they fundamentally oppose peace. Bad news, made worse by the fact that I doubt the Obama foreign policy team will force the Israelis to suffer any consequences for this.

Listening To The Generals

If you haven't been following it, Christopher Hill, a career diplomat who negotiated some of the better deals with North Korea under the Bush Administration, has been nominated for the post of US Ambassador to Iraq, and conservatives are flipping out because, well, that's what they do. Despite his credentials and history in the foreign service, they claim he has no experience in the region; really they are displeased with his actual negotiation with North Korea, which circumvented Dick Cheney and the neocons. Now the top US commanders in Iraq are voicing their displeasure with the GOP holdup of Hill's nomination:

There's one as yet unremarked constituency increasingly disturbed by some Republican senators' efforts to block the confirmation of former North Korea envoy Christopher Hill to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq: the U.S. military.

Sources tell The Cable that Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus, top Iraq commander Gen. Raymond Odierno, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are frustrated by the delay in getting a U.S. ambassador confirmed and into place in Iraq, and support Hill's confirmation proceeding swiftly [...]

"I would not at all be surprised if military commanders in Iraq are frustrated that they don't have a new ambassador in position," added Gen. William Nash (ret.), the former top U.S. commander in Bosnia, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The issues are far more political and economic than they are military and U.S. efforts need to move forward on those fronts. That's particularly critical in the execution of the withdrawal plan."

Asked if Republican objections to Hill that he is not a Middle East expert are legitimate, Nash said the opposition is "being difficult to be difficult. I have known Chris Hill for 14 years. He is a wonderful diplomat and exactly the kind of guy we need in Iraq."

Today is the sixth, that's right the sixth anniversary of our misadventure in Iraq, and the fiends who got us in this mess in the first place refuse to cease making life harder on this country. They cannot conceive of a world where economic development and diplomacy supersede the task of the military, so they want a subservient ambassador. Of course, the fact that the generals prefer Hill shows the hypocrisy of the neocons on this. They only listen to the advice of the commanders on the ground when it agrees with their aims. And they never take into account the hopes and desires of the people in the countries over which they mean to project power. The neglect of reconstruction and economic development in the war effort leads to outcomes like the water being undrinkable in Baghdad six years after the beginning of the war.

These are contemptible people.

The War In Gaza

The news out of Gaza is quite terrible. Israeli forces have moved deeply inside the strip and bisected the country. To soften up the defenses from Hamas, the ground invasion was preceded by a shock and awe artillery strike and aerial bombing, which allegedly included banned weaponry.

The ground invasion was preceded by large-scale artillery shelling from around 4 P.M., intended to "soften" the targets as artillery batteries deployed along the Strip in recent days began bombarding Hamas targets and open areas near the border. Hundreds of shells were fired, including cluster bombs aimed at open areas.

Cluster bombs are nasty, and most of the deaths from them typically are civilians who step on unexploded ordnance. There are other credible reports that the IDF has used white phosphorous, which is a banned substance.

One example of this is the use of White Phosphorus rounds in a way where the phosphorus does not burn off before it hits the ground. Phosphorus burns more or less on contact with air, and keeps burning until deprived of oxygen. People who suffer phosphorus burns not only have terrible burns, but they absorb the phosphorus through the skin, and suffer acute phosphorus poisoning. This used to be more common than it is, because phosphorus was used in friction matches and in industrial processes, it was sold for rat poison. During World War II, it was dropped on London as part of "the blitz." In the 1940's it was called by one journal article a menace to public health after noting that 50% of the people admitted for phosphorous poisoning died, as compared to 6% of all other non-alcohol poisonings.

So while using phosphorus rounds itself isn't against the relevant treaties, using it in a way that takes advantage of its toxic qualities makes it a chemical weapon, and it is completely inconsistent with any claim to be cautious or worrying about civilian loss of life to use it in a populated area, and allowing it to fall to the ground.

FDL has more.

Aside from the atrocities (which really shouldn't be put aside), I'm still wondering what Israel hopes to achieve. The standard claim is that they want to stop the rocket fire into Sderot and points south from Hamas. But outside of emptying Gaza of people, I can't see how this ground invasion will actually accomplish that. Not even the residents of Southern Israel think so.

"It's the same as usual," Peled, the community's security coordinator, said as he stood in a wheat field examining the mangled remains of a 19mm Qassam rocket that had slammed down minutes before. "They probably built this one just a couple days ago. It's brand new."

Since the Israeli offensive began nine days ago, the country's leaders have insisted that Israel's largest military operation in Gaza since its troops withdrew in 2005 would not stop until it ended the Hamas rocket fire. But residents of southern Israel have no such expectations. The rockets, they say, will go on despite what Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak described as an "all-out war" on the armed Islamist group that runs Gaza [...]

Most of the Qassams, Katyushas and mortar shells fired from Gaza have fallen without causing damage. But four Israelis have been killed in the barrage, while other strikes have caused injuries or destroyed buildings. Cities once believed to be beyond the range of rocket fire from Gaza -- including Ashdod and Beersheba -- have been hit regularly in the past week.

"I hope the invasion succeeds," said Peled, 65, who is responsible for finding the rockets after they land and making sure they have detonated. "But after so many years, it's difficult to believe this will work."

In fact, even if Hamas is disarms and overthrown - which Israel has stated is NOT their policy - there are other radical elements inside Gaza who could be strengthened by a weakened Hamas. The Salafists would be even worse than Hamas to deal with on Israel's southern border (think Al Qaeda in Palestine), and indeed the history of this conflict is a radical actor in the Palestinian territories replaced by an even more radical adversary. We have this notion that there is one radical Islamist unified front, but it's not true, and picking winners and losers often has unintended consequences.

Instead of airstrikes and ground attacks, why not talk to the enemy, as this former head of Mossad suggests.

The former head of the Mossad intelligence service, Ephraim Halevy, argues that ultimately it may be in Israel's interest to negotiate with Hamas if it helps to curb Hamas's political influence.

Alpher agrees that Israel should talk to Hamas. "Hamas doesn't want to talk to us ... just as Hezbollah doesn't want to talk to us, they don't recognise us. But as a strategic approach to Hamas, the offer to talk and recognise is another viable option which we have not taken."

Obviously, with an election coming in Israel, this is not going to happen. But ultimately, it's the only end to the conflict, and one wonders if the Israelis are learning from their losing of the propaganda war inside the United States, that bluster and neoconservative maneuvering has no home anywhere in the world anymore.

The Crackup

I've been watching this looming conservative crackup with interest for about a year. The three legs of their stool - the fundie theocrats, the economic royalists, and the neocons - have been made more manic by a culture of demonizing liberals and branding them as abberant, and a loss was sure to break wide the fissures between those three competing sects. In the primaries there was no consensus whatsoever - each leg of the stool lined up with their own candidate - and you could just see that this wouldn't hold together. And while I didn't think it would get this nasty this soon, that's exactly what's happened. Listen to Rush Limbaugh trying to blame moderate Republicans (like there are any left) and "intellectualoids" (no shit, his expression) for their problems:

In that sense, it was said the only opportunity this party has to regain power is John McCain. Only John McCain can get moderates and independents and Democrats to join the Republican Party, "and we can't win," these intellectualoids said, "if that didn't happen." Well, the latest moderate Republican to abandon his party is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts who today endorsed the Most Merciful Lord Barack Obama. He joins moderate Republican Colin Powell. He joins former Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan. He joins a number of Republicans like Chuck Hagel, Senator from Nebraska ...

Now, I wish to ask all of you influential pseudointellectual conservative media types who have also abandoned McCain and want to go vote for Obama (and you know who you are without my having to mention your name) what happened to your precious theory? What the hell happened to your theory that only John McCain could enlarge this party, that we had to get moderates and independents? How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents?

... When I saw the Weld thing today I smiled and I fired off a note to all my buddies and I said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! How can this be? How can this be? This is the kind of guy that our candidate was supposed to be attracting, and we were supposed to be getting all these moderates from the Democrat Party," and we will, by the way. We're going to get some rank and file, average American Democrats that are going to vote for McCain. But these hoity-toity bourgeoisie... Well, they're not the bourgeoisie, but... Well, they are in a sense. They're following their own self-interests, so I say fine. They have just admitted that Republican Party "big tent" philosophy didn't work. It was their philosophy; it was their idea. These are the people, once they steered the party to where it is, they are the ones that abandoned it.

Never has anti-intellectualism been so finely distilled. The theocons are training their fire on moderates as well. As if these so-called "latte conservatives" even exist. They created this monster and are part of its core. Now, suddenly as the ship goes down they don't want to be a part of it. And the right-wing populist wants to cast them off. More than anything, this is about loyalty:

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as "cocktail party conservatives" who "give aid and comfort to the enemy".

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"

Mr Frum thinks that Mrs Palin's brand of cultural conservatism appeals only to a dwindling number of voters.

He said: "She emerges from this election as the probable frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. Her supporters vastly outnumber her critics. But it will be extremely difficult for her to win the presidency."

This was inevitable without Palin and McCain - conservatives never take responsibility for their own actions, and they would have scapegoated everyone but themselves for this potential realignment. But the obvious tension at the top of the ticket is exacerbating this, and well before the election to boot. McCain and Palin have split on Ted Stevens. They've split on this very damaging wardrobe story, with the RNC thrown in as well. McCain staffers are openly calling Palin a whack job. And this is just embarrassing.

I’m sympathetic to Eskew and Wallace, and not just because they’re decent people. They’ve held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me—namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.” It’s a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus. I was told that Palin chafed at being defined by her discomfiting performances in the Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity interviews. She wanted to get back out there and do more. Well, if you’re Eskew and Wallace, what do you say to that? Your responsibility isn’t the care and feeding of Sarah Palin’s ego; it’s the furtherance of John McCain’s quest for the presidency [...]

I’ve heard from one well-placed source that McCain has snubbed her on one long bus ride aboard the Straight Talk Express, to the embarrassment of those sitting nearby. It has surely been implied to the governor that she should be eternally grateful to have been plucked from obscurity. And yet the high water mark of John McCain’s campaign for the presidency unquestionably began on September 3, when Palin gave her nomination speech—and ended precisely twelve days later, when McCain went off-script—I have that on the authority of the person who participated in the writing of said script—and told an audience that he still believed the fundamentals of the economy were strong.

I love that the signature failing of the McCain campaign was an ad-lib.

Even the state parties are fighting with their standard-bearer, which almost never happens.

So obviously, that's harmful. But watching this almost with a scientific curiosity, I would say that McCain and Palin are almost irrelevant to the fundamental disconnect between the legs of the Republican stool in this modern era. The seething hatred of liberals, and the revised "Arkansas Project II" that we'll see hounding Barack Obama will keep them together, but that's not a path to a viable political majority. That path is closed off for the time being, and thinking the answer lies in insufficient loyalty or too much moderation is a path to disaster.

Now after the election I guess the legs of the stool are going to get together for a confab.

The decision to waste no time in plotting their moves in the post-Bush era reflects the widely-held view among many on the right, and elsewhere, that the GOP is heading toward major losses next week.

One of the topics of discussion will be how to fashion a "national grassroots political and policy coalition similar to the out Reagan years," said the attendee, a reference to the development of the so-called New Right apparatus following Jimmy Carter's 1976 victory and Reagan's election four years later.

"There's a sense that the Republican Party is broken, but the conservative movement is not," said this source, suggesting that it was the betrayal of some conservative principles by Bush and congressional leaders that led to the party's decline.

They really still don't get it. To be honest, there probably isn't a way out right now. They'll have to spend some time in the wilderness. And the lonely staffers will have to go get some real jobs. But one thing Republicans aren't likely to forget is how to be an opposition party. They will bond together by frustrating a Democratic agenda, and they'll be very skilled at it. It allows them to look askance at their problems.

Revenge Of The Neocons

Following up on this bizarre story about John McCain seemingly not knowing the name of the Spanish Prime Minister, the damage control artist Randy Scheunemann has stepped away from his lobbying gigs long enough to offer an explanation, and it's worse than the initial assumption that McCain was just confused:

Zapatero is a center-left politician, but McCain has suggested that as president he would seek to repair relations that have been badly frayed in Europe during Bush's tenure. In an early-April interview with a reporter from Spanish newspaper El Pais, McCain said, "This is the moment to leave behind discrepancies with Spain."

He added: "I would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States. I am very interested not only in normalizing relations with Spain but in obtaining good and productive relations with the goal of addressing many issues and challenges that we have to confront together." [...]

McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Sheunemann (sic) said McCain's answer was intentional.

"The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain's willingness to meet Zapatero (and id'd him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview," he said in an e-mail [...]

Asked to explain McCain's apparent shift in tone and position since April, Scheunemann gave almost no ground.

"In this week's interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally," he said in an e-mail. "If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America's adversaries. It's called keeping your options open, unlike Senator Obama, who has publicly committed to meeting some of the world's worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office."

(That's Prime Minister Zapatero, genius)

The female interviewer basically backs this up, believing that McCain "ducked the question" because the Bush Administration doesn't have good relations with Zapatero.

Wow. I knew the neocons were belligerent, but this explanation makes them sound suicidal. Spain is a NATO ally. We would be obligated to go to war on their behalf if they were attacked. McCain wants to refuse to meet with their leaders?

This is part of a pattern of the McCain campaign trying to cover up a bad moment with an even worse explanation. But it's also worth noting that the neocons are far more invested in McCain than they ever were in Bush, if that's possible. He's a very willing parrot for all of their petty grudges and magical thinking. And they're scheming to indoctrinate the other half of the ticket.

Comments by the governor of Alaska in her first television interview, in which she said Nato may have to go to war with Russia and took a tough line on Iran's nuclear programme, were the result of two weeks of briefings by neoconservatives.

Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin.

Her case as John McCain's running mate was later advanced vociferously by William Kristol, the magazine's editor, who is widely seen as one of the founding fathers of American neoconservative thought - including the robust approach to foreign policy which spurred American intervention in Iraq.

In 1988, Mr Kristol became a leading adviser of another inexperienced Republican vice presidential pick, Dan Quayle, tutoring him in foreign affairs. Last week he praised Mrs Palin as "a spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism" that "is haunting the liberal elites".

Now many believe that the "neocons", whose standard bearer in government, Vice President Dick Cheney, lost out in Washington power struggles to the more moderate defence secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, last year are seeking to mould Mrs Palin to renew their influence.

They go after everyone. Some of them work out, some of them don't. In the end, they stay in charge. This "twilight of the neocons" idea was vastly overrated.

Georgia, Georgia, No Peace I Find

Well, I guess the rumors of a cease-fire in the Caucasus were very overstated, as the Russians have held their positions, warned the United States not to get involved, and basically redrew the map:

Russia's foreign minister declared Thursday that the world "can forget about" Georgia's territorial integrity, and officials said Russia targeted military infrastructure and equipment — including radars and patrol boats at a Black Sea naval base and oil hub.

...the comments from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared to come as a challenge to the United States, where President Bush has called for Russia to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia."

"One can forget about any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity because, I believe, it is impossible to persuade South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree with the logic that they can be forced back into the Georgian state," Lavrov told reporters.

And that, as they say, is that. The US has astonishingly little leverage in this conflict, considering their sustained support for Georgia and inability to be seen as an honest broker, as well as a reluctance to get into a shooting war with Russia. It ought to give the whole nation pause as to the effectiveness of the cowboy diplomacy of the Bush years, which John McCain wants to further and even enhance.

It's EASIER for someone like McCain to put on his combat boots and strut about and make belligerent statements against the Russians. It's a war that neoconservatives understand and find more potential in as an electoral tool than talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it's hard not to recognize that sad figure in the Max Boots and John McCains and Bill Bennetts and all the rest with their sustaining roots planted firmly at AEI HQ. After all, what happened to the long twilight struggle against radical Islam? So yesterday, I guess. Or can we do both simultaneously, even though the Russians are themselves up against hostile Islamic groups on their southern periphery?

Watching the Bennetts and the Krauthammers get all jazzed up about Georgia as the new Afghanistan, with all the painfully awkward nostalgia and excitement of an 80s era Gilligan's Island reunion flick is entertaining. But much less so when you realize these jokers might be running the government in six months.

Meanwhile, McCain can't even keep his own words straight on the conflict when they're not completely fed by Randy Scheunemann.

In effect, this is a local conflict where Russia is settling a Near Abroad dispute in their sphere of influence, and the degree to which we have to have a policy on that, especially when Georgia kicked off this conflict by indiscriminately firing on the South Ossetians, is dubious. I agree with Matt Yglesias:

The reality, however, is that Russia has no actual ability to move from Tblisi to Kiev. Georgia is tiny, poor, and geographically located so as to make it difficult for the West to provide it with any practical support. Ukraine has 10 times Georgia's population, 20 times its economic output, and extensive land borders with countries firmly in the Western orbit. The practical impossibility of conquering Ukraine, not American threats, is what will keep the Russians out of Kiev. Meanwhile, it turns out that, contrary to the fears of the hysterics, Russia isn't even going to Tblisi today, much less Ukraine tomorrow or Estonia the day after that. Vladimir Putin, unlike the leader of the United States, is apparently shrewd enough to recognize that military occupations of foreign territories have high costs and scarce benefits.

But while Russia's punishment of Georgia may not have major consequences for America or for world security, a hysterical American response just might. Most obviously, if we were to take things like John McCain's Aug. 12 proclamation that "we are all Georgians" seriously, we would be in the midst of a shooting war with Russia and literally risking the end of human civilization in a nuclear exchange.

By all accounts, McCain just wants to engage in some irresponsible posturing rather than to follow through on the implications of his words, but even excessive posturing and loose talk of a new Cold War with Russia would have real costs. Specifically, both McCain and Barack Obama have recognized that an agreement with Russia related to nuclear-weapons reductions is key to revitalizing the global nonproliferation regime. Russia can't conquer Ukraine or Estonia, but it can play a key role in helping or hindering American efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. And unlike the status of South Ossetia, nuclear proliferation is actually important to the United States. Having frittered away the past seven years on a foreign policy driven by hubris, the United States can ill-afford to misplace its priorities. With the active phase of the war over, we need to move beyond it as quickly as possible to more important issues, not indulge baroque fantasies of renewed great-power conflict.

Exactly. Humanitarian assistance to an ally is fine, but the talk of World War III is very dangerous.

Peter at Duck of Minerva has more.

International Incident Watch

It's upsetting to see the glee with which John McCain has taken to this crisis in Georgia, the thrill in his eyes as he attempts to re-fight the Cold War while claiming the opposite, and with all the honor and moral authority that goes with it. Only he's leaving some things out:

In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.

You hear that, George Bush? McCain's coming for you! Nations don't inv- what, he supported the surge?

Hey, every rule has its exception, right?

McCain also is sending envoys (his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Graham and Lieberman) to the region, and consulting with the Georgians daily - you know, like a real live President. How presumptuous! Do you think all this back-channel meddling is kind of hurting efforts to bring peace to a still-fragile situation?

Consider, then, the other loose cannon in all of this, Georgian President Saakashvili:

President Saakashvili today told Georgians that the US military was moving in to take over control of the country's air and seaports -- which would be a pretty big deal since much of the country still appears to be an active war zone.

And about five minutes later the Pentagon said he didn't know what he was talking about.

"We are not looking to, nor do we need to, take control of any air or seaports to conduct this mission," said Geoff Morrell, Pentagon press secretary. "The role of the U.S. military is strictly to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the victims of this conflict."

When McCain promises air cover for the next strike against Russian forces, is he going to fly to the region himself and apologize to all those Georgian mothers for the deaths of their sons?

What a nightmare.

UPDATE: See too this backgrounder from Scarecrow. I know Obama's on vacation and all, but he needs to push back on this. McCain is being reckless and needlessly belligerent.

Resisting Evan Bayh Puns...

When I first heard all the speculation around Evan Bayh as a Vice-Presidential pick I thought that was a sure bet, given the Obama campaign's button-down approach, that he wouldn't be selected. But many in the DC establishment are ferociously pushing him as a choice, and Steve Clemons' very informed take leads me to believe that the option is credible.

Word has reached me that at Barack Obama's Hawaii retreat, Evan Bayh's chances to find himself the next Democratic VP candidate have moved to better than 50/50.

The conflict between Georgia and Russia has been one of several factors that has helped boost his status. Bayh's support of the Iraq War and general hawkishness are seen by some as a balance to Obama's call for a new and different kind of global engagement strategy that McCain's followers consider naive.

That would be such a crucial mistake. Bayh's "hawkishness" led him to co-chair the neocon "Committee to Liberate Iraq" in 1998, an astonishing lapse in judgment that gave credibility to President Bush to start his illegal and unnecessary war in 2003. Look who else was involved with it, beyond the usual neocon suspects like Bill Kristol and foreign agent lobbyist Randy Scheunemann:

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) is pleased to welcome Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) as an Honorary Co-Chairman. Bayh becomes the third U.S. Senator to join the committee after Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced their participation on January 28.

It could be, then, that 3/4 of the major party Presidential tickets, in a time of failed neoconservative policies worldwide, would have chaired this committee.

Bayh has renounced his Iraq vote. And Nate Silver considers him to be about as liberal as he can be given that he represents Indiana. But I agree with Tom Andrews - the neocon embrace in 1998 is a but much.

“He was not only wrong, he was aggressively wrong,” said Tom Andrews, national director of the Win Without War coalition, referring to Mr. Bayh. “In my view, he would contradict if not undermine the Obama message of change, turning a new page on foreign policy and national security.”

Exactly. Bayh is a milquetoast centrist who wouldn't upset the establishment and would recede into the background and not compete with the more charismatic top of the ticket. But as Swopa notes, he'd be a terrible President, and after all that's the point of the selection. And he would send a very loud message to the Democratic elites that they're back in charge and Obama will fall right in line.

I'm part of the Facebook group opposing Evan Bayh. You should join it too. Ari Melber has more in the Windy.

UPDATE: Al From:

"The antiwar people cannot define the Democratic Party," said Al From, a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, of which Mr. Bayh was chairman for four years. "I think Evan’s real strength is you get someone on the ticket who has a record of being strong on national security, and that is a very important quality to have."

"Strong on national security" should actually read "wrong on the biggest foreign policy issue of his lifetime." I hope the NYT will make a correction.

UPDATE II: Bayh is STILL wrong. From Ari Melber's piece, this is the Indiana Senator about a year ago:

You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They're everything we thought Iraq was but wasn't. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they've threatened us, too.

Boy, he sure learned his lesson, right?

Wolverine!

So today John McCain let me know that we are all Georgians - especially the guys on his staff being paid by their government, I guess. Now, Russia and Georgia set conditions for a cease-fire and withdrawal, under a French framework (French!?), so I guess by "we are all Georgians" McCain means that "we are all losers of brief wars where we belligerently try to take over breakaway regions by force using indiscriminate violence and suffer the consequences." There are no noblemen in this conflict, but to signal some kinship with the Georgians is tantamount to allying with them in a dirty war against the Russians, which is just a fair bit of madness. Josh Marshall details just how dangerous this is.

The people that are pulling McCain's strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians -- and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too. But the Russians are probably more willing to oblige us since their power remains limited to oil reserves and military power. In other words, they're people McCain's folks can understand and vice versa.

McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.

Not only that, they're wrong on the facts. Russia has no interest in holding on to Georgia - their history in the Caucasus is one of much pain for their prestige and military power. They sought to teach a lesson, but an occupation would never have served their interests. So acting like this is 1938 when Russia has no designs on an iota of territory is just crazy. Putin is not a good leader and our failures in US-Russian relations have made him more dangerous, but there are ways to deal with him that are not military. The bluster, the belief that all problems have a solution with a bomb attached to it,

Matt Yglesias has more.

...it's also completely absurd for Obama to suggest NATO membership for Georgia, which is a subtler way of saying the same nonsense as McCain. There's some dispute on this, however; apparently a Membership Action Plan for NATO is not necessarily an endorsement of their entry.

The Power Of Not Being Reviled

So Russia starts bombing targets inside Georgia, the United States huffs and puffs to no avail. Then French President Sarkozy hops on Easyjet and stops off in Moscow, and within a matter of hours, just after he lands, Russia calls a cease-fire.

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia announced Tuesday that he had ordered a halt to his country’s military operation in Georgia, although he did not say that troops were pulling out and he insisted that Russian forces were still authorized to fire on enemies in South Ossetia.

The president said Russia had achieved its military goals during five days of intense fighting, which has seen Russian troops advance into Georgian territory and which brought strong denunciations from President Bush and other Western leaders.

Now, there are scattered reports of continued fighting here and there. And Sarkozy was just beginning cease-fire talks and didn't exactly provoke this. But basically, what you have is a country that maintains good relations and holds a little thing called influence, and another country that coddles their neocon friends and looks ridiculous.

(On another note, Sarkosy is a dead ringer for Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless)

UPDATE: According to Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, (h/t K-Drum) we begged Saakashvili not to attack Georgia (which I don't totally believe) and we "had an understanding" with the Russians that they would limit themselves to fighting in South Ossetia and not beyond those borders. That's just kind of stupid, to expect the Russians not to want to dominate their sphere of influence.

UPDATE II: Here's the smartest take on reconciling the Landay article about US entreaties to Georgia, from Robert Farley:

The other possibility is that the Americans said different things than the Georgians heard. This happens ALL THE TIME in international politics; motivated bias on the part of Saakashvili may have led him to believe that the Americans were making encouraging noises, because he wanted to believe that the Americans were encouraging him. Indeed, this would go a long way to explaining how the Georgians were certain of US support, despite the fact that there was no compelling reason for the Americans to give support.

That sounds right to me.

How Does Regime Change Feel On The Other Side?

This has the feel of unintended consequences.

Putin criticized the United States for viewing Georgia as the victim instead of the aggressor, and for airlifting Georgian troops back home from Iraq on Sunday.

"Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages," Putin said in Moscow. "And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection."

Look, there's no doubt that Russia's response, to incur far into sovereign territory and bomb civilian airports and empower separatists, appears disproportionate. But so did the bombing of Baghdad as a response to a terrorist attack they had nothing to do with. The President's denunciations and stern warnings just sound totally hollow. And to hear the Russians tell it, the initial assault on South Ossetia by Georgia has the earmarks of a genocide.

NOTE: It's not completely clear what's happening over there. Georgia is claiming that they're enforcing a cease-fire and yet there are reports of their troops firing on Russian positions. Each side is accusing the other of ethnic cleansing. The Georgians claim that the Russians have taken Gori but there are conflicting reports on that. So all reporting there has to be met with skepticism.

What is clear is that something was offered by the West to Georgia if they chose to blitzkrieg South Ossetia, and the Bush Administration failed to carry through, resulting in an almost impotent response.

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It's heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It's infuriating because it's clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia's separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

Georgia has American and Israeli weapons, a long history with the President, troops in Iraq (until yesterday) and an ally in their quest for NATO inclusion. That they received nothing for all that just shows the limits of cowboy diplomacy and a belligerent foreign policy. We cannot back up the tough talk with action everywhere in the world, and by promoting militarism and aggression, people die. Furthermore, the unnecessary war in Iraq eliminated any claim to the moral authority of saying that Russia invaded a sovereign state.

No wonder Russian "expert" Condi Rice isn't coming off her holiday to get involved. This is a disaster.

FWIW, Anatol Lieven has a good backgrounder. And here's Obama's statement today, which is not cribbed from Wikipedia, to my knowledge. Obama's in a tough spot, because the failed foreign policy of the Bush years has made this crisis almost impossible for us to help manage.

At Least This Means He May Have Figured Out How To Use The Internet

John McCain's statement today on Georgia, ripped off from Wikipedia.

First instance:

one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion (Wikipedia)

vs.

one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion (McCain)

Second instance:

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia had a brief period of independence as a Democratic Republic (1918-1921), which was terminated by the Red Army invasion of Georgia. Georgia became part of the Soviet Union in 1922 and regained its independence in 1991. Early post-Soviet years was marked by a civil unrest and economic crisis. (Wikipedia)

vs.

After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922. As the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the Cold War, Georgia regained its independence in 1991, but its early years were marked by instability, corruption, and economic crises. (McCain)

Honestly, I don't care if he ripped off basic biographical facts from Wikipedia, though it kind of diminishes his pretensions to having a rich knowledge of the region. I do mind McCain stealing his ideological outlook on conflicts with Russia from General Jack D. Ripper. Contrary to Georgian President Saakashvili's claim that this is somehow a war for the West (which I think tips his hand as to the level of American support he was promised), his country provoked this war and has consistently tried to needle Russia and cement ties with the West. At this point, calling for Georgia's inclusion in NATO is tantamount to calling for war with Russia. Who would want that? Both sides are very clearly at fault, yet with Russia rumbling toward Tblisi and taking over Gori the Russians are clearly the aggressor at this point. I think this statement, however, is very right.

Russia must be condemned for its unsanctioned intervention. But the war began as an ill-considered move by Georgia to retake South Ossetia by force. Saakashvili's larger goal was to lead his country into war as a form of calculated self-sacrifice, hoping that Russia's predictable overreaction would convince the West of exactly the narrative that many commentators have now taken up.

The commitment of troops to Iraq was also a calculated move on Georgia's part, with the expectation, fueled in the minds of the population, of a quid pro quo.

As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”

A similar sense of betrayal coursed through the conversations of many Georgians here yesterday as their troops retreated under shellfire and the Russian Army pressed forward to take full control of South Ossetia.

America may have wanted this kind of proxy attack or at least a show of force on Russia's border, and the massive response took everyone by surprise. As Dylan Matthews says, this is a disaster for the Bush foreign policy. His "freedom agenda" is in tatters as one of the progenitors of it gets crushed by an adversary; NATO expansion is dead, tensions with Russia are on the rise, and the Iraq "coalition" is seen for what it is, pure realpolitik. There are two responses to this mess - more testosterone-fueled foreign policy that would result in tactical nuclear weapon deployment or worse, or a calmer, less belligerent means of dealing with crisis. Guess which one each Presidential candidate fits.

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.