Say Russia would have just let Georgia take South Ossetia. A win, small one, but still.
Say, as it now seems, Russia overreacts. A big win, they are one big step closer to restarting the cold war. Which would suite some Russians hawks just fine, what I don't understand though is why exactly they think it would work out any less badly for them this time.
There ought to be some kind of recovery therapy for ex-superpowers.
if we suppose some neo-con/u.s. hawk conspiracy behind all this, i don't think even those guys are fool enough to think they will making strategic gains against Russia through this fiasco. more likely, they were thinking short-term and domestic: they wanted to dial up the volume on "national security" just in time to make McCain look like a more serious contender for the U.S. presidency than Obama. Cynicism is intellectual treason.
On a visceral level, they fear and loathe Obama and the possibility that he might get elected. If Georgian president Saakashvili and/or his newly US trained army, along with an untold number of Georgans, including Osetians and Abkhazians have to be heroically sacrificed to feckless Georgian agression and to the Russian Bear as pawns in the game, that is regretful. They will remember their sacrifice. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
His advisors on Russia are the same ones that have been selling the "democratisation" during the Yeltsin years. McFaul for one. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Newsies on the ground that are neither American, Georgian, Russian or South Ossetian (does South Ossetia have any newsies at all by the way?) confirm that Russia has secured or is in the process of securing South Ossetia, and that Georgian military installations in Georgia proper have been targeted by air strikes.
Various apparatchiks in the Georgian administration and the American press have made wild allegations that Russia has launched a full-scale attack on several fronts and shock-and-awed terror-bombed Georgian cities. But these reports remain unconfirmed, and given where they were originally published, are more than likely to remain unconfirmed.
All in all, the Russian response does not strike me as disproportionate.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
