You've forgotten the angloisraelosphere's cute lil' effort in Lebanon?  Weirdly similar conclusion btw.

"Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami

There are dead people. Shit has been blown up.

You forgot to add "profits have been made"

keep to the Fen Causeway

But what is this American obsession with religious affiliation ? I only found out that the UK tory politician Michael howard was jewish about 18 months ago depsite his having been around for years. Given his background as a transylvanian emigre my only reaction was to wonder if human blood was kosher.

keep to the Fen Causeway

I can't really see how "Frenchmen" - or any other people for that matter - can be both cowards and out of their league. I mean, if they are cowards, they run no risk of being out of their league. Right ?

This goes to prove that your correspondent is : A. Out of his league. And there is no need for a B.

We're quite capable of criticising both the US and Europe.

If the US played a role in this, it may be the first good imperial move the Bush administration has made - get Russia to expend resources on a war with a large potential to expand and drag out.

you are the media you consume.

Was Georgia really so niave as to rely on WSJ editorials and conservative foreign policy think tanks in making its moves? I doubt it, they gambled and lost and their stupidity does not excuse Russian aggression.

The head neocon cheerleader is still trying to save Georgia's naïve ass, and he's using a very big forum to make his case:

Op-Ed Columnist - Will Russia Get Away With It? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: "While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia."

But Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence -- about 2,000 troops -- fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of -- and perhaps destabilizes all of -- a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.

For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine's. Shouldn't we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?

Have their been an LTE's written on this topic that could be recycled to respond to this column?

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

Perhaps, then, we might understand how it came about that Georgia was not naive, yet gambled and lost out of stupidity.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

If "Europe" means "the EU" then I don't see a whole heck of a lot we can do. We have precious little leverage with Russia, and even less trust. We have zero leverage with Georgia - they're an American client state, why should they listen to the Union?

Realistically, what we have at our immediate disposal is monetary aid and humanitarian aid for the carrot and trade sanctions for the stick.

Russia doesn't need monetary gifts. They may or may not need humanitarian aid, but I'm not sure why they should trust us enough to allow us to dispense it on any useful scale anyway. And there is no reason to employ trade sanctions against Russia - it is not clear that they are the aggressor in this crisis. (And it's not clear that we even have the capability to deploy meaningful trade sanctions against Russia.)

Georgia might need monetary gifts - but I really don't think Europe should make a policy of throwing money at American client states. There are plenty of more deserving recipients. Georgia very probably needs humanitarian aid by now - or shortly will if things continue at the present pace. That should, of course, be granted, regardless of what we might think or not think of the Georgian government. Deploying trade sanctions against Georgia is pretty pointless - they're losing the war badly enough as it is, if they need any more stick in order to reach a negotiated settlement, then trade sanctions are unlikely to be it.

So humanitarian aid to Georgia to attempt to repair some of the civilian wreckage of the war. Same to Russia and South Ossetia, if they think they need it and want to accept it. That would be my recommendation, at least until we have sufficiently hard facts on the ground to start issuing arrest orders for the relevant war criminals.

- Jake

Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam

Who cares what the neo-cons were saying, the question is. What's Europe going to do about this?

Nothing very much - in the sense that US foreign policy analysts normally think about this.  The notion that "Europe" should intervene - presumably militarily - when two neighbours fight over territory is in itself a product of an imperialist/militarist mindset (and not just a neo-con mindset).

I am not knowledgeable enough on the local situation to adjudicate on the rights and wrongs of the respect positions of Russia, South Ossetia and Georgia.  Some outside diplomatic mediation to arrive at a negotiated solution is the best we can probably hope for.  Sarkozy may not be everyone's idea of a skilled honest broker, but at least he appears to be trying to dampen down the tensions.

What we have now is a relatively limited regional dispute.  Why raise the stakes and turn this into an issue of nationalist principle of Russia against the World.  That would be playing to the militaristic agenda on all sides

"It's a mystery to me - the game commences, For the usual fee - plus expenses, Confidential information - it's in my diary..."

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.

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

Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam

you are the media you consume.

yeah, that 'peace dividend' just wasn't putting enough money into the right pockets...

cui bono?

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin

I'm in a criminal minority here, but I suspect that Russia wants normalized relations with its neighbors, respect for its people, Nato off its doorstep.  Why people find it nearly impossible to imagine Russians, who posses human dna like everyone else, would want the same things as everyone else, I don't know.  But flip the idea around in your head for a while.  It's so crazy it might just be true.

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."