If this sort of exchange happened (and we won’t know for at least 30 years until the files are opened, if then), the US error was in not adding, “But Misha, under no circumstances should you do anything military about it right now. Your planning staff if full of siloviki, and Ivan will know what your guys are doing probably before you will. Ivan’s also just finished a big exercise, so there are ten different kinds of trouble just waiting to come down the road. And military help from the West? Ask the Hungarians about ‘56. Just saying.”

Now it’s possible that this kind of warning was delivered and ignored. It’s possible also that Georgian leaders knew or believed that the Russians would follow their recent military infrastructure upgrades in Abkhazia with similar in South Ossetia, making this a now or never play.

Regarding Georgia, I fail to see the relevance, other than that it is very unlikely that the U.S. gave the go-ahead to Saakashvili or understood any notifications that Saakashvili gave them beforehand. That is ascribing more competence to the current U.S. administration than it appears to possess. As for the assistance that Saakashvili is getting from the United States, I’m sure he’s just eternally grateful for the sternly-worded letter that the U.S. Ambassador to Russia just handed to the Minister of State there. Why, a few more sternly-worded letters, and Pooty-poot can start a fire in one of the Kremlin’s fireplaces with them!
Sad to say, some people just don’t seem to learn from the examples of Lon Nol, Nguyen Van Thieu, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, … U.S. support means nothing, in the end. So it goes.

Confrontational approach to Russia? Yes, Russia has every right to try to keep the territories it landed while the body and head of the Soviet Union. To say otherwise: confrontational!

What we’ve got here is a bona fide Imperialistic War of Aggression for Oil. Any minute now, Progressives all over the world will hold demonstrations. Documentaries will make the circuit. Performance artists will run riot. To stop this policy, George Soros will spend incredible amounts of political money with people who normally cry about enormous amounts of political money being spent.

Any minute now… any minute… wait for it… just… around… the… corner… Godot? Was that Godot?

Badtux, the government of America - actually, let’s be honest - America authorized its government through a representative democratic process - to invade the one country in the middle east that a) had several casus belli for more than a decade, albeit largely unrelated to the direct attacks of 9/11, b) was at the fulcrum of Arab and Persian Islamic Crazy, c) could, by way of placing a competing meme (pluralistic democracy) right smack in the middle of the Middle East entirely change the rules of the game.

No, Badtux, what you’re missing is that YOU’RE the one not seeing far enough. The policy of tit-for-tat, keystone cops finding only the perpetrators of an act of terrorism was and is a myopic, amateurish policy. It allows the enemy to dictate the rules and the intensity of the game. It’s policing, which isn’t about stopping crime so much as mopping up after.

What you’re missing Badtux, the possibility which eats you up at night, is the reality that the Bush administration’s reasons for going into Iraq always was about a radically different plan for the Middle East. Afghanistan was important, but only for punitive reasons. To change the war, we had to go deeper. Saddam’s bad luck he was the best target around. People like you think you have to take the queen (in this case, Saudi Arabia) in order to win a game of chess. No, boy, you don’t.

You’re looking at the Magna Carta of the Middle East. You don’t know it yet. And it will be years until you are able to admit it. Weeks after that, I’m sure you’ll pretend it was an accident on their part and your idea all along. But there it is.

Or is it just that you don’t want to consider the notion that you’ve been wrong all along?

I notice that non-Americans ascribe far too much competence to the U.S. government. This is the same U.S. government that, confronted with terrorism in the post-September-2001 era, decided to invade the one and only nation in the Middle East which did not participate in the terrorist attack against the WTC and Pentagon. This is the same U.S. government that, confronted with ragtag militias with no external base of support in Afghanistan protecting the organizer of those attacks, managed to, err, well, lose — Osama bin Laden is, as far as I know, comfortably situated in a cushy condo in Islamabad courtesy of the ISI. Surely by this time even Europeans should have clued in that the current U.S. government is not competent to choose its own breakfast, much less give the go-ahead (or not) to the outbreak of WWIII. I wonder what the deal here is… is it just that people don’t want to consider the notion of a nation ruled by idiots that also possesses nuclear weapons because, well, that’s a disturbing concept?