Nice sober analysis. We are not going to do anything because we lack the ability short of risking nuclear war. But other than doing nothing I think it would be very helpful for our political discourse to have an open discussion on how the US under both Clinton and Bush has acted provocatively against Russia. If we can accept and admit part of the responsibility for this crises then it will be much easier to re-establish a sane diplomatic and peaceful relationship with Russia. Steve Clemons over at Washington Note is having this discussion also.

Thank you for this article, but to not simpathize with the Georgians does not make you a 'heartless bastard'. The comment line no one is bringing up is this being mostly about a civil war. South Ossetia has never accepted being part of 'Georgia' going back to when the country was a middle-age style protectorate of the Safavid Empire in the 16th Century. Russia is simply cloaking their own interests with the pleas of the South Ossetians to save them from the Georgian Nationalists the Ossettians always struggled against.

The closest thing to this encounter in the current American context is the northern quasi-independent state for the Kurds in Iraq. Bush tried to partially justify the invasion of Iraq for actions taken by Saddam Hussein's regime to suppress the Kurds and bring them in line with his own authority. The Kurds screamed for help and the US answered by invasion and 'regime change'.

I think Russia is acting in their own purely nationalistic interests, as nations do every day. To look at this as a struggle of the West or Democracy vs. Russian Autocracy misses the history and reality on the ground. While I don't like Russia's overreaching into Georgia proper, if the US was being threatened by one of our neighbors, we'd stomp them into a bloody mass and install our own friends as rulers.

I guess underneath that gruff maverick exterior, McCain is really just a "romantic fool"...

“He wanted me to say thanks to you, and give you his heartfelt thanks for the support of the American people for this tiny little democracy far away from the United States of America. And I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, ‘Today we are all Georgians.’"

France can defend Spain? Surely, you jest.

NATO is superfluous. Spanish prime minister at least posed for a photo together with Bush and Blair, but what they need to be defended from? Morocco? Iran? Russia? Unruly Brits getting drunk and disorderly?

The sad realty of Georgia not being worth a global conflict is just that.... a sad reality. And by global I mean Russia and the USA, since we are on opposite sides of the globe - and just like in WWI, the dominoes will fall on either side. And by fall, I mean the other nations will become cannon fodder.

But this is not a sad reality I want any part of. We politicized animals love to jump on our high horses and shout to the rooftops about all the things we should do as freedom-loving, conscious-driven, democratic Americans.

But it's all a croc, innit? Our first priority is to re-prioritize - get the hell out of Iraq and get the hell into Darfur, into Russia's face, and into the Pakistani caves and wherever else we need to get to to find the bastard bin Laden.

In other words, pick fights that demonstrate our freedom-loving, conscious-driven Democratic ideals, and walk away from the ones that are about power and power alone. Like Iraq.

Putin and Melevdev be damned. And we should be damned as well is all we offer is rhetoric.

so when you gonna splain how mcsame is making sense ???

I didn't see a single reference to mcsame in the body of the post

so if this post is about what kaplan says, why is mcsame in the title

looks like you're gettin as goofy as mcsame

Interesting Kaplan admits being wrong on Iraq, called this one right.

His call to cut consumption of oil is correct.

He is starting to get what Woolsey has been saying for quite some time, I incidently joined Pickens Plan today.

The Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had a few choice comments to make about those southern people from Georgia who thought war sounded like a really swell idea until things started going badly:

"We can not change the hearts of these people of the South, but we can make war so terrible, and make them so sick of war, that generations will pass away before they appeal to it again.”

"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it..."

"You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better."

"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! ... You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth — right at your doors!"

I'd say that Vladimir Putin undertands American Civil War history -- not to mention the so-called "Powell Doctrine" on when, how, and for how long to wage war for limited political objectives -- much better than the self-styled American southerner Deputy Dubya Bush and his swell American-educated buddy Mikheil "Shaky Willie" Saakashvili. And the American people who blindly swallow our government's lame, transparent propaganda -- shamelessly shilled by the co-opted New York Times and Washington Post -- really ought to take Sherman's advice and find more reliable information elsewhere.

I usually suggest "follow the money". What are these two countries fighting about? The US and Russia want to frame this as being about ethnic cleansing, but when did anyone ever really care about that?

The current situation in Darfur and the prior ones in Rwanda and elsewhere show that the west is pretty good at ignoring things when it is only people's lives that are at stake.

So what are the US and Russia really fighting over (Georgia is the US proxy this time)?

According to one analyst on the BBC yesterday the answer is natural gas. He claims that there is much natural gas to the east of Georgia w