Like Sherman's Invasion of Atlanta...

...just the other Georgia, half a planet away.

I have been trying to figure out what to say about the whole Russia/Georgia thing when lo and behold, Mr. Furious put up a post and a link to The War Nerd. This guy provides a bunch of historical perspective on where this came from, why it's happening, and why Putin knew he could do this without consequence. It's not that long of an article, about 5 to 10 minutes of your day, and is well worth the read. You have to pick through just a small bit of his Armchair General-style editorial comments and callousness towards war victims, but I'm callous enough myself that it didn't get in the way of a good historical perspective.

Relevant to today:

This time [in regards to whether or not Russia would swoop in to help an ally], the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the US is all tied up in that crap Iraq war and can’t do shit; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It’s tit for tat time, with Kosovo as the tit and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naïve idiotic allies like Georgia.

Yes. We are all tied up in that war in Iraq. I think what adds to Putin's assuredness that this would go his way is that a lot of our allies...U.S. allies...in Europe really like Putin's oil. They, in the form of NATO, are not exactly clamoring to fight this out either.

And now the mighty U.S., police to the world, can't intervene:

The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.[emphasis added by me]

I have not heard what either of our Presidential hopefuls have said about this, but I assume Obama has had the good sense to leave it alone and give McCain the rope he needs, or said something harmless and trite. I'll assume McCain said something uninformed but tough-sounding. But this is not a post about Obama or McCain. I just wanted to get that out of the way. This is a post about this fascinating little war and what it means for us, Russia, and Eurasian stability.

***UPDATE***

From Mr. Furious again, pulled from Publius over at Obsidian Wings:

For me, it’s been fascinating to watch the militant anti-Russia critiques from McCain and the neocon usual suspects. What’s interesting is not so much the intensity of the critiques, but the underlying similarities between the neocons and the Russians. More precisely, what’s interesting are the parallels between neocon thought and the thought that led the Russians to attack (or counter-attack). In short, both are motivated by militant nationalism.

Read on. Well worth it. Discuss.

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