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
